The Geeks Blog

Hmm, a quick look at the activity report shows around where things changed dramatically:

Thu Nov 01 4

Fri Nov 02 1

Sat Nov 03 3

Sun Nov 04 2

Tue Nov 06 3

Wed Nov 07 4

Thu Nov 08 3

Sat Nov 10 2

Sun Nov 11 1

Mon Nov 12 2

Tue Nov 13 5

Thu Nov 15 1

Fri Nov 16 2

Sun Nov 18 2

Tue Nov 20 2

Thu Nov 22 1

Sun Nov 25 7

Mon Nov 26 6

Tue Nov 27 6

Wed Nov 28 25

Thu Nov 29 9

Fri Nov 30 15

Total for Nov: 106

Sat Dec 01 14

Sun Dec 02 17

Mon Dec 03 28

Tue Dec 04 29

Wed Dec 05 23

Thu Dec 06 45

Fri Dec 07 31

Sat Dec 08 30

Sun Dec 09 21

Mon Dec 10 12

Total for Dec: 250

Do you see that? Less the 5 almost every day for a couple of months, and then bam 7, then a couple of 6's, then a whopping 25 and the searchers haven't stopped since. So where in the heck did they all come from? Are they site or web searches? Doesn't say, unfortunatly.

Well, feel free to give your opinion on the polls, the one here, or this one and another on the hack, which is done. This is my last grasp for more feedback from you folks. Other then the occasional 'help. I'm stuck' email, almost all of the other forms of feedback have gone ignored. Have a good one, and I will see you back here when I have something significant to say. Night.

Well, I tried. I turned off all the lights, laid down in bed and I laid there for 45 minutes staring at the ceiling. I am still feeling like absolute shit, and I am worried about the horrid day ahead of me. The YMCA thing, and the Pro retest, I just don't know how to deal. I find it hard to study, but I find it harder to accept failure. I know this test is my last chance, but I also know I am very unprepared. I also have a test for Cisco chapters 5 and 6, though that one I should be able to postpone. Either way, today is one hell of a day, with many big decisions.

*Yawn* *YAWN* Yes, I am up, and much too early for my liking. Last time I recall before waking up was about 7:05. I woke up for good at 9:12. Yes, that's a little over 2 hours. The verdict is in, though, for the Y. $16.05 per month with tax, which is a good deal, but as I have said before. A good deal is only really good if you have the money for the good deal. If you give me a $100 product for $6 right now, it is useless to me as I only have $5(of my own). This is why I hate the great RAM prices that are available. You hear the techxperts say 'RAM is so cheap there is no reason not to buy'. Sorry, guys, but the best reason I have ever heard is 'I don't have $40 for that 256 MB RAM stick'. Ahh, I am just a tad grumpy this morning, and I am gonna go eat breakfast and study some more. I will try to put something up here later.

In case you have been trying to answer the polls from the hack, it is not working right now due to my failure to notice some hidden inputs when I was editing that page in Dreamweaver. Here are the two of them for your answer. Hopefully these help.

As you all may have noticed, there was no hack. This was mostly intentional. There was also almost no blog posts. This was also very much intentional. To catch you up, the Pro retest was not too bad, but I would have been best served by simply re doing the original final as most of the ones I was lost on were also on the final. All in all I think I failed again, but Tago told James we can challenge it yet again if we so choose, so that is a consolation. As well, I exchanged a heavy round of emails with my mother yesterday between returning home from my appointment at the Y and leaving for school, and it has been decided that a year's membership will be one of my Christmas presents. That is nice to hear.

So, I will be a member likely on Monday, which gives me the weekend after the final to start exercising. I cannot begin next week as I have to study by butt off for the Server final, even though we have yet to cover 7 chapters of the book in class. We are told that will be next week. 7 chapters, in 4 or less days(the test may now be on Thursday instead of Friday) and study the materials already covered as well. Joy. Now for the reason I have not done a lot in the way of posting on either daily journals. I guess the best summation is If I have nothing helpful or decent to write about, I will not write. I feel that these last few days have been full of stuff I find useless, like the old news links. I have been posting old news stories on the Hacks, and struggling for stuff here, and I am sorry, that just isn't what I call constructive writing. Doc says "I really don't write that much. I just write that easily. When you type as fast as I do, it's almost like talking.".

I am saddened to say I qualify under neither of those. My writings rarely come easily, nor do I type fast, and when I do I usually make more mistakes then Outlook(my default spell check) knows what to do with. I have noticed there are odd times when I hit what I best describe as a sweet spot. I can never reproduce it, it just happens. I am writing, and expressing and everything just comes together, with the output being a great piece. Sadly, these events are few and far between. Most of the time I struggle to make my thoughts come out even half as good as they are in my head. I think of the term I want to use, or it's definition, but I struggle and fight for the word or term I want to use. Usually I settle for a lesser and wholly(it's happening right now actually) inadequate word or term. I always know there is something better to describe it, but I settle cause I cannot do any better. When that happens it usually throws off the whole roll I was on, and derails the entire article.

I have said it before, I have not the memory for the stuff I do. I know people who can recall word for word what was said at one point in time, occasionally weeks before, while I often cannot recall the name of an article I read a very short time ago, sometimes as little as 20 seconds ago. Often I go back and read the title of an article several times before getting it right. This, my friends and loyal readers, is why I rarely, if ever, post a lot, or about topics that I want. This is also why I usually quote articles, not phrase my own thoughts. I just cannot do it. If this makes me an inadequate blogger, so be it. If this means I shouldn't blog, well, then I won't. If my posts are not good enough for all of you, or even me, well, then don't come around and I will quickly get the hint. I will therefore not be posting without something great to say. This will likely mean I will not post much, if at all. You could call this an overdue time off, or you can call it me being a coward and running away. Either way, this is what it is, and how it must be. I cannot, in good conscience, post in the writing style that I find I have degraded to, and will have to live with the consequences. If you agree, disagree or just want to give me your own stories, feel free to. Email is at the bottom

Well, I just did the infamous Web Trends analysis, which I trust a great deal more then the ones from Trinic, and I am very pleased to say that the average day is increasing rapidly. The average over the period including August to the 8th is now 77, while it used to be 27. The two weeks I have of December so far show 287 average per day. Needless to say, I woudl liek to welcome you all to whatever section you have come to visit. Pleasae fill out the poll's and tell me what you think.

Ok, now this is odd(I say that too often, ya think?). When I click the View Results link from the first poll, it gives me an error. When I do the same on the second, it gives me the results. The only thing different is a 1 and a 2. Anyone else see this? Ok, well, now I know you cannot even cast a vote. Grr. Ok, figured it out. It displayed two on one page, and therefore they cancelled each other out. I have temporarily changed the format to 2 days on the main page, so that solves that problem, though they still will not work from the Archives, which shows both on the same page. I will implement my permanent solution later from home.

The oddities keep on coming. Now Radio isn't showing the index page for the builtin web server. I can see everything else, the weblog page, the server log page and everything, but the index.wsf file gives a Internal Server Error. Maybe Dave might have some info on this, as the Radio site has nothing. This isn't the first time it has happened, but a reboot usually fixes it up nice. I have done three of those already.

Morning. The hack is up, longer then expected, and my sleep will pay for it. I will see you all sometime later. If email to me comes back to you, please ofrward it temporarily to geekworld at shaw dot ca, as I am having trouble recieving email from Trinic, and I am not sure if it is even being recieved by their servers. Thanks. Night.

Evening. I woke up to my email access back up and working after going to bed to no email or news access from anyone, and had 105 emails from the Security Focus mail lists alone. I quick skim of them shows nothing I am really interested in, other then a new worm, the third in the last couple weeks. More on that later though. My inbox did have one interesting letter, from someone named Kevin.

Dwight,



Click on this link and you'll realize your typo...

http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=than



You should have titled your article "Pretty Good Privacy is better than

having anyone who wants see your email" or maybe "Pretty Good Privacy is

better than allowing anyone to see your email" would be better.



Other than that, it's a great article.



Kevin

He makes a good point, as I was never happy with that title, but I was hard pressed to come up with anything better. My reply is as follows:

Thank you. I never was happy with the title of that article, but I also

could not come up with a different one. The title will be changed to the

second one ASAP. Thanks for visiting.

The advised changes have been put in place, with his second recommended title, and the affected pages have been uploaded. Not a big deal, but I am happy to see there are people honest enough to tell me I screwed up.

Is it as apparent to anyone else how much has been lost after 09.11, more then the actual attacks themselves? I sit here everyday and see how much is being taken away, in the US and all over the world. The USA Patriot Act has taken away most of the most necessary freedoms in the US. Thousands are being held for simply being Arab, with no other proof of any wrong doing. In Canada here we are seeing the strong possibility of a similar act being brought in, simply because we are neighbors to the US. There has been no proof brought to the public's attention that there are any attacks here, but yet the borders are backed up for hours at any form of border crossing, and why? Cause we are neighbors to the US.

In the UK the only thing stopping their anti freedom law from being passed is the house of Lords. More is being taken away in the wake of 09.11 then was lost on 09.11. Funniest thing is many are applauding the government for not taking the heavy handed approach of Ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons in retaliation. Why use those measures when they know they can been Al Queda with what they are using, and they can still use reason to take away liberties. This way they win a lot more, and leave a lot more for themselves. Oh, and let's not forget, if you question their methods then you are a part of the problem, then you are a terrorist. Ingenious, Dubya, ingenious.

CNN's September 11 Memorial site. Excellent site and an eery list. I have not and will not read the list cause I don't want to know if there is anyone I know on it. It is not that I would not mourn, but I already mourn for the lost collectively, which is hard enough as it is.

John has an interesting page about how to use CSS. "Daynotes On A Budget - CSS Basic Information" is a fairly comprehensive look at the code that is CSS. I use it myself here on my sites, but I have not yet found a great resource that simply lists all of the possible variables. I know CSS can be used on every tag, but I also know there are some additional tags, like the scroll bars code I use. Check it out if you are interested in making your site look a little better, but one good point is that it is very easy to go overboard.

As I promised, here is some info on the newest worm, W32.Gokar.A@mm, which Sarc reports 'will send itself as an attachment to all addresses in your Microsoft Outlook address book. It also will create an mIRC Script.ini file and an inetpub Default.htm file to try to spread itself'. The payload is described as "Sends mail to all Outlook addresses Creates a C:\inetpub\wwwroot\default.htm file Creates a C:\mirc\script.ini file". The page says the following is the removal instructions "Delete files detected as W32.Gokar.A@mm, remove the value that it added to the registry, and if necessary, rename C:\inetpub\Wwwroot\Redesi.htm to C:\inetpub\Wwwroot\Default.htm". Here are a few news stories I have located.

Well, I am very tired, and I am going to bed. The hack is done, and the Beta will be updated this weekend sometime this weekend. Night.

Well, the much expected patch for the bug in all versions of Internet Explorer from 5 to 6 that allowed any malicious code to be executed without a warning from your anti virus has been released. If you run any version of IE, from 5.0 on, I really recommend you download and execute this patch, or you will very easily be infected, no matter the other protection you run.

John Dominik has graduated from his ever popular ridiculing of Spam, not to mention his analysis of foreign recipes, to the new picking apart some of the moronic disclaimers. I admit those have long been some of the stupidest things I have ever read, from the one on the curling iron 'May get hot when plugged in" to the new one asked for by the anti gun lobby which would warn that Guns are dangerous. John does a long version of asking what the heel were they thinking.

Well, the hack is up and done. I will see you all back here tomrorow, in around a dozen hours if all goes as I hope.

Ok, now I am getting mad. I get a funny feeling, and I really do not like it. I was working in Dreamweaver for a while earlier, and it started acting more then a little funny. I tried to select multiple cells and all of a sudden it would, without my doing so, select the whole table. When I would type, the cursor would move to mysterious places in the text area. This gives me all the known indications of Trojan. I hope this is not the case, as I have been ultra careful, but if soemone used the known IE vulnerability in the time before it was patched, well, then I am in some serious troubles. This would mean a complete reinstall of the OS ands all other programs, after a low level format. I am not willing to take any chances at all. I will, though, wait for more evidence, for example other programs exhibiting similar behavior, before I take such drastic action.

Smoking? Too bad. I guess I have been out of the loop in local news for too long, and that is partly due to the fact I am sleeping or at school when all news casts are happening. I just saw an ad for the City of Winnipeg that says their moronic smoking ban goes into effect on the 1st of January. I still say that when they ban cars, they can ban smoking. The average car, driven to work and back, causes more pollution then a carton of cigarettes. I don't know if there is a study for that, but it is sheer common sense. Cars pump deadly toxins out of their pipe, 4 inches across, and anyone who has had to sit behind them on a bike, or worse, walking behind them, will tell you that it is often painfully hard to breath if caught in the wake of one of these toxin pumping assholes.

Now, if I sit in a room full of smokers, it is bad, but not nearly as bad as behind a car for a few minutes. What is the logic of banning cigarettes in public places when they are already banned in bar, and lounges? I have no problem allocating a larger non smoking section, then a smoking one, this is one of the things I, as an advocate of smokers rights and an ex smoker as well, have come to live with and accept. The logic baffles me though, why Eaton Place has to be non smoking? Go to that mall's food court at any time when lunch rush is in full force, and tell me which is has more tables filled. Now, I am not talking about percentage, I am talking table for table. The Non Smoking section has more room, more table and is always maybe 1/4 full. I have never seen it completely full in my life, and I used to go there all the time. I have seen it very much standing room only in the Smoking section when lunch rush begins, never mind half way through.

Yes, I know that smokers are bad. I know smoking itself is bad, and that one should not have to breath another's smoke, but I also should not have to harm my slowly regenerating lungs by breathing in the fumes from a car or truck. If smokers are pariahs, then car owners are tyrants, forcing everyone else to breath the fumes or your vehicle, without even a second option of being away from it, is both insidious and cruel. This is to say nothing of the fact that I cannot even walk out of the way of the worst clouds of the stuff in the summer, as I cannot see it. When will we have a no driving part of the street, completely closed off from the cars? Will bike riders ever have a chance to choose whether they bike beside cars, in this city where biking on the sidewalk is against the law? I doubt it, as I doubt the logic, or lack thereof, behind this law passed by what must be the stupidest City Council this city has ever seen.

I see that Keith is burning the midnight oil to get an A in math, and I wish him best, but I am working right now for my educational future. Therefore, I am back to the books. This has been enough of a break for now, and I doubt I will be back for much tomorrow, and there wil likely be no hack, but if there is one, it will be more of the same as yesterday. Unfortunatly, this means I miss the debut of Anti Trust on Movie Central, which I have been waiting two weeks for. *sigh* Oh well, see you all more steadily soemtime around the 22nd.

Scoble asks "Why doesn't Microsoft automatically update everyone?" and my answer is this "The reason Microsoft does not just update everyone is many, like me, do not trust Microsoft. I do not trust that the 'upgrade' will always be to my benefit. This is likely just my paranoid delusions of them interest in owning all that we do on and off computers, but there are still a great number of patches I have not installed, and upgrades I have not done, simply because I do not want or need them. I was running IE 4 for the longest time, until just before 6 shipped. I did not, and really do not yet need IE 5, I just wanted to make my sites better by showing them on the newer browser. If Microsoft forced me to upgrade anything, I would simply format my HD and move completely to Linux and compatibility be damned, and so would many people I know."

The following is for either Canadians only, or Manitoban's only. Has anyone out there ever had the 'pleasure to but the Presidents Choice brownie mixtures from the Real Canadian Super Store? Anyone know how to break up some of those massive lumps in it? If you have bough the stuff, you know that when you open the package it is one solid lump. I spent about 25 minutes just now trying to get all the lumps out using about 5 different ways, and thought I had done it. Not so. I added the requisite water, egg and margarine, and it has hundreds of tiny lumps. If I toss it in the oven as it, I will have powdery pieces in it, I know. I have done this before. Now I know why I like stuff from scratch.

Everything, in my opinion, tastes better from scratch. I was really hoping that I could make Chocolate Chip cookies, as I am great at making them, and have never had a complaint, but my mother did not have the money for chocolate chips, never mind the milk chocolate chips I had asked for. With cookies it is also easier to filch a couple pre consumption without anyone noticing Well, this is just the requisite practice batch, so I need not worry too much about lumps, but by the time I make the real one in a coupe days, I hope to have the lump problem solved. Wish me, and my brownies, luck.

I did try to post that a lot earlier, but Blogger was down, so it didn't get back up until almost midnight. Sorry.

Well, as I am much too busy to write up a hack, this will have to do. There have been very few interesting things today, or this weekend in total. I studied, I ate, I slept, I edited, I studied, I studied, I slept. Oh, and I swam. That was my weekend. When I wasn't studying, I was eating,m or I was doing some redesigning of the beta. I only did this when I was unable to do it any more. I did get some time in tonight to go to the YMCA and get my membership and do some swimming. It was nice, but I will have to find someway around their foolish rule about not being able to shampoo or condition your hair. I am sorry, but after spending an hour in their pool and whirlpool, I am not going to let me hair go all ratty until next time I get into my parents place. At the very least I will use a little bit of conditioner on my hair. Speaking of my hair, anyone in the Winnipeg area know of a good, low cost hair dresser? I think we get a discount at school, but I will have to check. If so, I will have to make an appointment to get a trim before the end of the week.

I have discovered a serious problem. The problem began today, and I am certain it has something to do with the IE patch I installed just a few days ago. The problem has now happened while visiting two sites with nothing in common. The problem is the computer freezes up, always when in a browser window. This is a freeze up that is beyond a c+a+d, beyond even a forced shutdown, and requires a very hard reboot. I am not sure what in the patch does this, but that is the only thing that has been installed or changed in the last few days. This is the second patch for an MS product that has discovered to have bad consequences.

I am sorry, but I have a problem with what Red Hat has done. In case you missed it, Red Hat did what Microsoft would have done if they came into Linux, with the GPL. Red Hat is trying to control copies of their product sold by using the copyright and trademark laws, which apparently supercedes the GPL. I see the need for controlling copies of their product that have alterations, but are the same laws going to infringe on me burning CD's of Red Hat software and selling them to people I know? What about some of the other for profit Linux distributions? I know that Red Hat has to protect their name, one they have fought hard for, but when it hinders the Open Source nature of the product, then it is not right.

Evan says "I believe it's perfectly reasonable for Red Hat to protect it's brand by not letting people sell CDs with their name on it. Their reputation, and, therefore, the product with their name on it, needs to be under their control if they are going to be successful in building a business—especially the value-added-version-of-a-commodity business." I agree that they need to protect their name, as long as they do not stop the free distribution of their product. That is where I disagree with Evan, because I think he looks at it to much from the business man trying to make a buck, and is ignoring the fact this is still GPL'd software, which requires the right to distribute it free of charge. The question in the end will be, is GPL more important then trademark or copyright?

Now they did it. Google finally came up with a service I doubt I will ever have any use for. Google Catalogs. What the hell is the use of that? Mail order? I thought Google was a internet company. Oh well, I guess they truly do want to index everything.

Doc points to a very useful and long winded explanation why Spam Subtract does not have a alternative OS version, but they fail to do one thing, which is vital. They fail to explain when a Linux and Mac version will be available. Yes, these platforms already have such products, but their use will be very much incomplete unless they support these two popular OSes. Oh, and to show the pie of visiting OSes is both insulting and rude. Yes, Windows outweighs any other OS, but until they support the others, they will not get the visitors.

Grumble, grumble, grumble. I so do not want to be here today. My stomach is killing me, and the flu is still in full force. I was hoping the excursion to the Y last night would help me feel better, but instead it has made me feel worse. We have at least one test today, though I do believe we can leave when we are done it, so that means I should be done here around supper time, assuming we write the test at our usual 5:45. I am not sure what all I will be up for writing tonight, as I need to prep for the Practical test on Wed./Thu. and a Cisco test tomorrow I think. We will have to wait and see.

The nominations are in for the 2001 Scripting News Awards. I will not discuss my votes, but there were some that I thought deserved to be on the lists. Keith Devens for one. His knowledge and insight is always helpful and he is also very supportive and opinionated. I also like the fact that he has taken it upon himself to try to find me a solution for XML while still using Blogger. I do think Dave deserved to be on the list for best scripting blog, seeing as he does own Scripting News, but I guess conflict of interest played a part. Vote for your best, and tell Dave what you think of the way it has been done. Maybe we need a web wide blog awards site? Dave made it clear these are his choices, sop maybe some of us disagree or think there was missed stuff. Also, does anyone else think there should be a write in slot for each, in case you don't see your favourite blogger there? Enjoy, and good luck to the nominee's.

Dave made a great point about Spam arriving due to publishing your email address on your blog/site. I agree that the only other option is to not use email at all, but why should that be? Why are my choices limited to live with Spam or live without email? Sure, there are previously mentioned aggressive filtering techniques, or the apparently popular Spam Subtract and like programs, but why can I not just open my Outlook Express and have everything just work? I can still tell you to the day when my site was crawled, or at the very least the day the list the previously mentioned crawl got became active on lists, because ever since my email, both Hotmail and email addresses posted on site, have been inundated with half a dozen spams a day each. The way I know these are list is because I will get 5 or 6 copies of the same email, one at each address. When it arrives in my Hotmail and my geek at... email I know it came from list A, if it comes to boss, webmaster and geek at this site, I then know it came from List B, and so on. There are, by my estimation, about 6 or 7 lists, each with varying amounts of emails from this site. The funniest thing is I have yet to see a list that has hit the page that used to have every email I use on it. Boy was that a page looking for trouble.

That is it. I am sick of this. Since I got home to a frozen machine at 9:30 I have rebooted this machine at least 8 times. Not bad until you consider I was sleeping from 10 PM until about 30 minutes ago! I am going to put in motion a reinstall of 98 SE or a move to Pro, cause I am getting tired of the constant problems that have cropped up the last week or two. From Dreamweaver crashing and playing ghost, to Outlook Express crashing when going from one newsgroup to another. The recent IE crashes and or freezes have made it absolutely necessary. IE is a vital part of my computing experience, and if I cannot even use that, then I either don't compute or fix it, quick. I am trying to narrow down the problem, and am not currently running Outlook Express, to see if maybe it is a background app that is freezing, instead of the foreground app. I will let you know what I come up with.

I see we have one more displeased person, in regards to the Scripting News Awards. CamWorld, one of the nominated sites, has ranted that these are nothing but a way to stoke Dave's ego. That may well be true, but since he first mentioned them I never expected to have a say in the nomination process, and only a minimal affect on the voting process. This is why I posted that soemone with clout should form an independent and unbiased awards for blogs and other online journals. I would vote for as Daynote's group, a best named blog, best named site, content filled site and more. The nominations would be open to voting, and the voting would have a write in space. The name of it would be the Blog Awards. I do not nominate myself, for an award nor as any part of this, but I just think soemone should do it. A rep from Blogger(or the community itself since it seems to be a one man operation), as well as one from all of the other major blog tools, like Radio(I want Scoble there), greymatter, editthispage and others. I know there are others, I just cannot think of them. I think a 10 person board, mixing blog tool makers and blog community members would be great. Here's a few categories I have in mind and a few mentions of sites I would include, if I were in charge of nominations:

Daynoter of the Year

• Robert Bruce Thompson


• Jerry Pournelle


• John Dominik(for
  longest rant filled posts, on average)


• Shawn Wallbridge(most
  enviable toy collection, not because he is family)

Blogger of the Year

• Doc Searls


• Robert Scoble


• Keith Devens


• Dave Winer


• Craig Burton


• Dwight Wallbridge(yes, I have
  no shame)


• Meg Hourihan(spelt right?)


• Leo Laporte

Most Improved Blog

• I know of none to list, but surely some of you do

Best Blog Software

• Moveable Type


• Greymatter


• Blogger


• Radio Userland


• Editthispage

Most welcome new Blogger

Best Blog Directory

• NewsIsFree


• Yaysoft Weblog Directory


• Weblog Madness


• Know of any others? I don't

Best Technology Blog

• Segway Blog


• XP News


• ICANN Blog

Best Named Blog

Blog you'd be most likely to link to

Best Editorial format

• DaveNet


• More to come soon

Best News Based Blog

• Slashdot


• GeekNews

Now I admit these are all simply wishes and ideas, but I think I have compiles a pretty comprehensive list, and most from my own favorites. Due to that limited source I know there are some I missed, so I would certainly open it up for more nominations, or any nominations in some of those categories. This is why we would need a widely based board, not just one or two people deciding who gets in. As well, there should be a time to add a new category, if enough people want it, or think it is needed. Please remember, I do not have any interest in beginning something like this, as I have not the time nor the ability to do something of this magnitude, but I do thing someone should. Any nominations(except me)?<G>

I had to know that someone in the Linux community would do this eventually, though I have to say that Linux Journal is the best suited to run the OS Resale forum. This is self described as "an auction site intended as a medium for those looking to rid themselves of unusable software that came with their computers or other hardware." This in light of a California ruling saying such stuff is legal. Cool.

Well, since my mother still has not noticed the Trinic check going through her account, and I am not sure where January's monthly fees will come from anyway, I will say now I expect this site will go dead on the 1st. Yes, that is the same day as the expected relaunch, which I was planning on delaying anyway. I will try to talk to my mother, but I fully expect everything to go down then. This is why I have tried to cover the simple costs of running this site by the slightly profit making banners on the from page, for NCIX, Chapters/Indigo and eBay. The eBay one alone pays me $4.50 everytime someone signs up from it. Therefore, if you want to support the site, buy something from one of the sponsors, or simply sign up for eBay from the front page. This is the only recourse left me other then to ask for donations, which I would really rather not do. I need to make $20 between now and the 1st, which is about 2 weeks away. I will, in the meantime, try to see what I can do about keeping it up from my end, even bartering and dealing with my mother.

On a side note, as you have likely noticed, this is the second time I have posted to the Blog in the time and topics generally saved for the Hacks. This is not to give the impression that the Hacks of an Abnormal Geek are dead, it is just hard to run Dreamweaver and a lot of the time I don;t have enough to say when I go to write the hacks. Therefore this site will be done, occasionally, in the place of the hacks, but not on a permanent basis. The only reason I am even up is I wasn't feeling well when I got home, so I went to bed, then woke up around 4 AM, and I can't get back to sleep. I just wanted to clear up the expected confusion of the direction of the daily posts on the site. Thanks.

Who says geek's don't know how to have a party? In the fine celebratory fashion of Silicon Valley, and in light of the recent release of Mr. Sklyarov from future legal proceedings, the fine folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Linux Journal are havign a "Dasvedanya Dmitry" party out there in the bay area. Too bad I don't live a little closer(or even in the same country) or I would go and have a few drinks to toast freedom in the 21st Amendment Cafe. down a couple for me folks.

I have a couple of news stories from the Register now. The first is a continuation of the Red Hat install from hell that was experiences by Thomas C. Greene of The Register, who says he has found Harry Homeowner proof Linux install, Mandrake 8.1. "The Mandrake installation beats even SuSE's, which is relatively comprehensive and trouble-free." and "No need to hesitate; the Pro package sells for a mere $70.00, compared with XP's $300, so it's hardly a major investment even if you should run home to Redmond in the end.". Mr. Greene seems to be very impressed from what I have read, with few problems. I do point out that while he had no problem, I am still very confused as to why JC's install of Mandrake 8.1 failed to let him use a serial keyboard and PS/2 mouse(on an expansion card). Maybe I will shoot an email off to him to let him know that Mandrake is not infallible. Maybe it was a lack of drivers.

The second story from The Reg is about the attempts by the FBI to achieve by a dumb mistake what they could not do with their now well known virus, Magic Lantern. If you know anything about the Bad Trans virus, you'll know it installs a key logger, and occasionally sends the logs to one of several mail dumps, where it is later checked over by the writer or another malicious cracker. One of these many mail dumps is hosted by San Francisco's MonkeyBrain.com. This is all not unexpected, in a time of higher rights for customers of such services, but what is a little annoying is that the FBI is trying to get access to the information in that mail dump, which has recorded over 5 million dumps since the virus hit the net not too long ago. In response to the request by the FBI, MonkeyBrians has put the info, in a way, out there for all to see. Most of the site is inactive 'pending legal consul.", but they seem prepared to at least tell you whether info from a specific email address is in their mail dump. If they have had 5 million dumps in the time since Bad Trans went live just over 2 weeks ago, and they are one of possibly a few hundred dumps, we can only imagine how many logs have been gathered, and we also do not know if any other ISP's have willingly give this info to the FBI without raising a stink like this one has. The Register says they will keep track of this story and report as soon as they have something, and I promise to do the same.

I am not an expert in US law, but the American that was fighting against the US along side the rest of the Taliban and Al Queda shouldn't have access to the same rights as any other American. The man left the US, went to Pakistan, and only revealed himself as an American when his life was on the line. The man's lawyer has complained that he has been questioned for 16 straight days without the presence of a lawyer, and also that his family does not know his condition. Well, for the first, tough shit. I don;t care if he is question for the rest of his life, short as it should be, without a lawyer. The man was involved with the group that took 3,000 American lives. He doesn't deserve the right to an attorney. As for his family not knowing his condition, who cares? If he had any knowledge or involvement in the attacks of 09.11 then he does not deserve to live, never mind rights. Question him, then take him out back and execute him. At least he will know his killers unlike a good percentage of the people who died on 09.11 and in the aftermath.

Now that the major test of the week is done, I can go back to reading materials I enjoy for a short time at least, which is currently the December issue of Wired. There is one article in particular that I have not gotten to, but has had a fair bit of mention on the web, especially from those in Silicon Valley. The reason? It is about them, from them, and about how their children may be. It is titled Geek Syndrome, and it is about a growing number of kids in Silicon Valley who suffer from Autism and Asperger's Syndrome. I have not gotten to it yet, but as this is a growing concern of computer professionals, one has to wonder what is causing this. Is it the power lines that power the silicon based revolution, or is it in the radiation emitted from older monitors, and soaked in by the bodies of software engineers and web designers who spend 10 - 16 hours a day in front of a computer. I don't think there will ever be a perfect answer, but we do need to solve this as the technology expands and grows, both in and away from Silicon Valley.

The big entertainment story today is that Tom Green has filed divorce papers on Drew Barrymore. The couple has been married for less then 6 months, and the papers cite Irreconcilable Differences. I hate that term. Did she cheat? Was she not good in bed? Did you cheat? Were you not good in bed? I mean come on, if you are going to get a divorce, at least have the balls to say why. Is there a divorce in Hollywood that does not cite those two ill defined words? Would anyone who is not a multi million dollar star couple be able to get away with that? I doubt it.

The Universal Music Group has solved the problem of how to enforce copyright and allow people to listen to CD's on their computers, sorta. The problem is that if a song can be played from CD on a computer, a song can be ripped from CD and distributed in MP3 form. This is a logical assumption, and has proven harder then it sounds to solve. The typical solution is to watermark CD';s to ensure they cannot be played or ripped on computer, but that has proven to be a badly planned and heavily protested move by some of the largest record labels. The first CD to hit the UK with digital copyright technology was quickly removed and the label offered non protected copies for anyone who wanted them. Universal's solution is to indeed use copyright protections, but it will also 'allow' you to buy a copy online. This is not a misprint, apparently, you can buy the CD in a store, and then you can buy a digitized copy from their Pressplay service when it launches later this month. Yes, you will be paying twice for the same song. Wired says they are the first label to release a copy protected CD in the US, but I happen to know there have been at least a hundred other CD's released with such protections in the last few months. I get the feeling this is the first CD to actually tell you it is a watermarked copy. Now I know why I do not listen to CD's anymore, and just live with CMT and the Digital Radio from Shaw.

Wired looks more in depth at the new Google Catalogs service, currently in Beta, which apparently indexes 600 current catalogs, and 900 back issues. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said David Krane, a spokesman for the site. "This effort is consistent with our mission.". As I said before, I understand the need to index all information, but how bout we index all the online content, then we can move to the paper content, ok? Good.

Here is something I had not noticed was going on, as did most I have noticed. In late November Microsoft released a White Paper(what is a white paper, exactly? I would assume it means a paper without any markings of the releasing agent, but this one has all kinds of MS markings) about Windows XP Embedded versus Embedded Linux. The paper is typically pro Microsoft with the requisite conceit, shameful self promotion and key omissions of critical points. Last week Red Hat, one of the attacked Embedded Linux providers, replied with a lengthy article, summed up best by Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer of Red Hat, "It looks like a classic Microsoft (version) 1.0, full of errors and omissions,". The other day Lineo, the other attacked distributor, released their own comments. This all comes from one concise article from ZDNet, though it is best summed up as this, Don't Trust Microsoft.

Well, I have found a new definition of mad. I was looking at CamWorld(what? not archived links?), for a previously noted rant on spam, and the first thing he points out is to look on a search engine like Google for your email address. I have now discovered that O'Reilly has been very sloppy. Want a list of email addresses they send newsletters to? It is publicly available and has even been crawled by Google. GOOGLE! God damn, what is such a great publisher doing keeping their suscriber lists so blatantly viewable on the web, especially for so long? They cannot say this is a few minute problem. You do not get crawled and indexed by Google in a few minutes. The file is huge by text standards, and I would guess they have about 500 or more email addresses. I wonder what those 500 people think about spammers getting their email addresses from a place like O'Reilly. I will be composing an email to Tim O'Reilly immediately.

Here is the email, only to the webaster email, not to tIm as well. They hide his email for soem reason.

The first thing I would like to say is that if I had Tim O'Reilly's email address, this would be CC'd to him as well, but as such, this is simply going to you, and will be posted on my site. T%his is in regards to the lack of care O'Reilly seems to have for those subscribed to your mail lists. The ordeal began with a simple search for my email addresses, at the recommendation of a site I frequent, and I discovered the following URL as one that listed one of my most often used email addresses:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When I post this to my site that URL will be blanked out, only out of respect for the other people who have addresses on that list. Let me list for you a random sampling of email addresses of people who have trusted you with their email addresses.

I assure you if you look at that URL, you will see there must be at least a thousand email addresses. In a day and age when Spam is a very bad epidemic, to see a company like O'Reilly being irresponsible to this degree is both shocking and horrifying. I was a fan of O'Reilly books, and have several associates whom have written books for your company, but today I am ashamed to own any books by O'Reilly. Thank you very much for making me lose faith in your company as a trusted company.

I really don't think I will be here long tonight. Unless Tago has some lecturing, I will pry head home on the 7 PM bus, as my day has already been long enough. In case you all missed it, I was posting on here when I usually am finishing up my hack for the night. Needless to say, yesterday was a very weird day. Today was beyond description. I got home from school at around 9. I watched a little TV, but was feeling bad, so I went to bed. This was around 10 PM. I woke up around 4 AM, and went to work on the computer for a bit, trying to tire myself out again so I could get a decent amount of sleep. This failed, as my 15 or so posts will inform you. At 9 AM I headed out to the YMCA, and swam for about 3 hours, till close to noon. Then I went for a bus ride to Student Aid, ands waited for close to an hour(is it me or is 'can you wait a moment' always a bad thing to hear?) and found out I need to get a Psychological Profile from the person who diagnosed me, along with a one from a trained person which says what kind of computer and at which level I need one for. Joy.

So I called my mother and asked her to call the CGC, and see if they have a copy of the original diagnoses. I have no idea how I am going to come up with one that says what kind of computer I need, seeing as they allow a reimbursement of $1,200, but no $$ up front for one, and the next time they meet is Friday, I think. She said if I can get the stuff to them tomorrow, she can fit me into their meeting just before Christmas. they are closed next week as well, she said. She gave me the name and number of this place though HSC which can do one, perhaps at a lower cost, but I don't see how I can get one arranged and completed, with paperwork into them for Thursday at the latest. I really need to sit down with my mother, badly, to try to figure out where to go from here.

I got response from the O'Reilly debacle, which I now figure was a listing of subscribers to all of their different newsletters, as we all got an email saying they are taking submissions for a conference they have coming up. The culprit was an employee, who did an excellent job of accepting the blame for the mistake, and making a valiant effort to deflect the blame from O' Reilly itself. The conference is the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Westin Santa Clara, and the newletter sent out was a call for participation for the same. The copy sent out is still available, though the email address file is gone. Too bad I downloaded it, and can prove the incompetence if need be. I would have liked a letter from Tim himself, as this is a very serious breach of confidentiality, but the following which I got will do:

From: "Steve McCannell" 
To: <geek at geeksworld dot net> 
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 1:31 PM 
Subject: Re:Insulted and infuriated 



 Hi Dwight, 

 

 Not much I can say to excuse myself here, this file has since been deleted, 

 and the reason it was up on my public directory is quite a long story (and 

 one I'm not sure I can even explain). I'm not sure how much reasurrance it 

 brings you that the file hasn't been publicly available for longer than a 

 week, and is my fault entirely for not removing it from my public directory 

 after I finished with it. Unfortunately because I work for O'Reilly, my 

 misstep reflects your view of the company who employs me, and I hope you 

 only question their hiring practices rather than their worth as a company. 

 

 I doubt I smoothed over ruffled feathers, but I hope you'll accept my 

 apologies and attribute the mistake to this lone employee, not to the 

 company. 

 

 Happy Holidays, 

 Steve McCannell 

 O'Reilly Network

Well, this has been a few days in coming. The hack is up and done. Enjoy.

I have had no demand, and had no other feedback then what Keith had to say, but I have heard many criticisms of the Scripting News Awards, so I am seriously considering doing an impromptu awards, with open nominations, and a significant voting scheme. I will contact a few people who might be able to help with writing a script to tabulate votes and nominations, and it may just launch on the 1st with the rest of the site. If anyone would be interested in helping, feel free to let me know. Also, thanks to Keith for the additions of sites under blog tool and weblog directory. He mentioned NewsIsFree in a previous email, I simply forgot it. This would be a lot easier if I knew at least a little perl to write a script. *sign* I guess I will have to get cracking on reading Webmaster and printing of the Web Design in a nutshell book, as well as Learning Perl and Programming Perl 3rd edition from the O'Reilly Safari site and the CD Bookshelf CD respectively.

Well, I am off to the Y. When I get back I will work on a primary list of Awards for the temporaily named Bloggies, though if you have any nominations for Blogs that fit into any of the categories, or even a new category not thought of, please add them using comment, and I will update the list. Well, it's either that or Blog Awards, and I wouldn't try to be so conceited to think these will represent all of Bloggerdom. See you all later. Oh, and the awards will be a part of this site, not the Geek's World domain, that is when this moves to the geekblog.com domain, whenever Trinic gets the friggin check and hosting is figured out for it.

Well, I am off to the Y. When I get back I will work on a primary list of Awards for the temporarily named Bloggies, though if you have any nominations for Blogs that fit into any of the categories, or even a new category not thought of, please add them using comment, and I will update the list. Well, it's either that or Blog Awards, and I wouldn't try to be so conceited to think these will represent all of Bloggerdom. See you all later. Oh, and the awards will be a part of this site, not the Geek's World domain, that is when this moves to the geekblog.com domain, whenever Trinic gets the friggin check and hosting is figured out for it.

Damn. I knew I shouldn't have had a nap. I slept in and missed my bus. I will be a little late, but I don't think it will be too bad.

I will say it now, so you all don't wonder what happened later, but there will be no hack tonight. I didn't think it was possible to feel any worse then I have the last few weeks, but I found a way to make it clear to me that it is very possible to feel one hell of a lot worse. As I said, I woke up at 2 AM and did a bit of site work before going to the Y. I was feeling a little better at the time I left, so I decided I would do 3a little actual working out, like on the weights or something. I went for a short swim, and then hit the gym part of the Y. I tried the bikes first, but decided quickly that this would not be in the plans, and moved to the treadmill, figuring walking can't be that hard. 15 minutes into my planned half hour of walking I quit as I was covered in sweat and my knees were sore.

I went back down for a swim and then came home for 10 AM. I was planning on working on the list of categories and nominees for the Blog Awards I am planning, but instead decided to take a nap for a coupe, hours. Apparently I did not set my clock right as I woke up in pain just after 2 PM, and rushed off to school, meanwhile discovering that catching the 3:37 bus from the Legion actually gets me to school close to on time. I am not sure if it was the moronic workout without liquids, or the dramatic increase in sleep, both of which my body really does not like, but I had a very bad headache to go along with the flu that has returned with full force. It could also be due to the fact the only thing I had consumed was a cup of Dew, about a liter of water, and a few pieces of Brownie, which I might add turned out better the second try.

I haven't had a chance to do anything site side, but as I have no school tomorrow, and I have no plans to go to the gym(2 days in a row is fine for me), so that leaves the entire day other then the possibility of attending the PLUG meeting, so I should have no problem getting at least the list for the Blog Awards done. Since the awards will be for blogs and all things included in them,. there will be additional categories for best comment system, and other third party blog add on's. More on that tomorrow. There will also be little or nothing here tonight, as I will pry just veg and watch a little of the boob tube. For some reason my eyes are a lot more sensitive to the lights of the screen, causing me to squint even worse then usual. I am certain I need glasses, keeping me from using the last bastion of hiding my geekdom. Night.

On the event of the monolithic release of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring today, most bloggers and geek';s alike have something to say. If they haven't seen it(though most die hard's were waiting in the same spot at midnight as they were for The Phantom Menace) then they plan to within a few days. One reviewer on Geeknews says that people should read the book first. Sorry, but I have not the time to do that, though I do plan to soon enough. One odd thing I noticed was the bitchfest that has erupted from the aforementioned review on Geeknews. To my novice eyes it sure looks to me like it is one guy flaming a review, for no particular reason. What the hell ifs the use of picking apart and otherwise excellent review? Yes, the movie is long, coming in at 3 hours, but if they had stuck religiously to the book it would have neared 5, maybe more. Is it not possible to rant against this missed parts and also make a point of the length?

Oh, and I just wanted to say the guys at MIT have outdone themselves yet again. First they made up one of the campus buildings(The Great Dome? What kind of name is that for a building?) to look like R2D2 for the launch of Phantom Memace, but now they have done up the same building with a copy of the Ring from the LOTR movie in painting. I must say, these guys are truly amazing. Is it possible to do anything better?

I may have found a new web host. SynAck web hosting, newly launched, sounds to be a great company, with a $10/month for 50 MB(and $2 for an extra 10 MB/per month) account. If they have FTP, I would have no problem moving all of my sites there, especially since I am pretty sure I can work out a deferred payment plan, as my brother is the owner and sole(I think) proprietor. As I told my brother, the only thing that stands between he and I is the necessity of Blogger uploading via FTP and he prefers SSH. I am already working towards eliminating all but three email addresses, which is all I use(two really, since admin gets no email anyway) and I think $20/month is a decent price for 100 MB. I would like to be able to limit my site size to less the 50 MB, but it sure seems like it is next to impossible. I think I will email my brother and see what's up and try to work some stuff out. One thing I need to know is whether or not he is willing to open up FTP to the two known IP's used by Blogger, as well as how he feels about hosting multiple domain names. I have three now, and another coming up soon enough. We'll see. Either way, check it out, as I really stand behind him, not only because he is my brother, but because he really knows what he is talking about.

Ok, I have a few more ideas. No, I am not asleep, as I think that the supper I had(a nice heaping plate of Spaghetti) had the much needed effect of giving my body something to feed my body with. Back to the ideas, as I consider how I want to set up nominations. Since I want 5 people to nominate a blog for a category as well as give myself or someone else involved in the awards a chance to ensure the blog actually belongs in a category or specifically in the category it is nominated in, I was thinking of, and I should qualify this as a pipe dream that is very possibly not scriptably possible, even if I had my own server running it. That said, I want a nominated blog to be added to a list of blogs, which people would then vote for. I also need an IP restrictor included in whatever script I use, to eliminate the possibility of ballot stuffing that I was reminded about by Keith, though that was the first problem I had with the plan to go ahead with the Bloggies.

Here's a quick run down of things I want in the nomination script, some of which will also be present in the voting script:

• Nominations automatically added to a vote for nominate page
  
• IP control, so that any one IP can nominate one blog per time period, likely per day
  
• Ability to mail additions to my email address, or to a person who might be assigned to deal with a block of categories
  
• Simple migration from the nominations script to the voting script
  
• The ability to tabulate how many votes for nomination each one got, in the highly possible eventuality that I will have to limit the number of options per category. I am thinking of BOTY(If I stick wit that category) will have no more then 15 or 20, and the rest no more then 5 to 10.
  

So, anyone out there know of a script that has all of that already? Assuming there is not one, anyone want to write one, or help me write one?

In response to Keith's letter of opinion he posted on his site, I will post my own slightly confused reply:

On the topic of a BOTY award, I
know there is some sticky ground there in that some do not want anyone to be
named the best, because there are so many great blog's out there. I would
consider not naming a best, but maybe a top 5. This would require voting
results be kept to myself on that one, but maybe this would solve it. I also
know that if people learn there are awards that some will blog to win the
award, not blog for the love of Blogging, but that is usually pretty self
evident and would generally disqualify a blog. If every second line is a
link to the awards and then someone begs for votes, that is beyond the scope
of my awards and is also working against the overall meaning of it. As far
as ballot stuffing, I was planning on an IP based voting system, if this
would be possible, which is to say each voter has their IP recorded and that
IP cannot vote again. This may raise the disk space needed, but it would, I
think, make it a little more secure. What do you think? My plans as of now
is open nominations as soon as I get a hold of a voting script, which I was
going to email you about, by the way, and close the nominations about the
first of February, with voting beginning 1 week later and lasting for 30
days. Let me know what you think. See ya.

I promise to have a basic form set up to base scripts on within 24 hours. I will not promise to do it tonight, because I don't know how I will feel after Buffy, if I watch it at all. Either way, I will have it available for viewing tomorrow, but without a script backing it up, a submit will likely only get you an error at best. This may mean I disable or delete the submit button. If you want a copy of the htm document so you can design a script, please let me know, or just do a simple view source, but the basic format would have to remain the same so I can edit it myself. The chosen scripter will be properly accredited, though any scripts submitted will be run through a few script knowledgeable people I know to ensure it is safe and secure.

Duh! When I wrote into the webmaster at oreilly dot com email about the email addresses being viewable, I said I would have sent Tim O'Reilly a copy if I knew his email address. I didn't think it would be as simple and obvious as tim at oreilly dot com. Doh!

Good afternoon. I had a feeling my pain causing nap yesterday would bring my sleeping schedule back into check, as I just woke up, at around 2 PM. That is right around 12 hours after going to bed at 1:45. There is some very big news today, or I should say over the last few days, but first a few LOTR links. The official site is the first one up, with a huge amount of features, from the trailer to screensavers, all the way to wallpaper(apparently) though I could not quite locate them. The second is the info page found at the Internet Movie Database for the movie, which is a good way to get a quick run down of who is in the much anticipated film, and also to see what they have done before.

The biggest news since Excite's death, is that the bidding war over the entity formerly know ad AT&T Broadband is over. AT&T/Comcast, the newly merged cable provider, was announced yesterday. A multibillion dollar deal was announced that will bring the two together for $47 Billion in stock and $25 Billion in debt owed by AT&T. The one thing I am more then a little confused about is who wins in this. The press releases make the impression that Comcast ids the buyer, but the fact that Michael Armstrong of AT&T will head up the new entity, which will have over 22 Million customers combined, and that tells me that AT&T will be the leaders of this new company.

I would like to tell one of my southern neignbors, John Dominik, that Winnipeg can be fun in mid winter, as long as you really try. It is all in the mindset. The same can be said of our balmy summers. I will concede, though, that Winnipeg is likely not as much fun as Arizona is in mid January.

I have been watching TechTV for awhile, specifically Call For Help and The Screen Savers, and there is one thing I have noticed quite a bit. The users ability to allow odd noises and other problems to persist for a very long time before becoming concerned and contacting a computer professional. I have noticed this myself as well, but only because a lot of my stuff is out of my control, like when I thought my hard drive was going, and it turned out to be a fan. Why is it that people accept noises that could be bad? Is it that they don;t know what they mean? Does it not cross their minds that the grinding noise could be a problem or that the computer freezing up every 5 minutes for hours at a time could be bad? Instead we just accept the error messages, or delay the visit to the repair shop(or call to the local geek), which I would say is one of the top causes, overall, of lost data.

Took Microsoft long enough to decide what everyone knew they would have to do. Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against Lindows for trademark infringement,, for the naming of their Linux based operating system. The Lindows OS, expected sometime in 2002, will be designed from the ground up to run both Linux and Windows programs, and directly compete with the Redmond based company. When I heard they were suing a Linux company, I thought it might be Redmond Linux, because Lindows is still a great piece of expensive bloat ware, which is expected to do nothing that any other Linux distribution can't. They should have nothing to fear from this non existent OS that they do not fear from any other distribution of Linux, though that is certainly no amount of consolation for Microsoft as they have proven they fear Linux a great deal. Maybe this is just them doing their best to use the courts to disperse the Linux revolution.

Ok, that's it. I am going to email Shawn right away about hosting my sites at his new hosting company, SynAck. My mother apparently emailed me earlier today, and told me I could pick up the assessment for Student Aid form the CGC, but it did not get through. This is a culmination of many other problems with email since moving to Trinic, many of which are people on certain networks are not able to get mail to me for long periods of time, if at all. Usually I just recommend people send twice if I do not reply in short order, but this time it is too far gone. This is a very important thing, and if they have cost me this computer in a decent time frame, I am going to be very mad.

On the topic of computers, I saw an ad put up at the Y the other day that was selling two computers for $1,500. I think they both run Windows 200, one is a 1 GHz Athlon, and the other is a 266 MHz Pentium II. Both look to be well designed systems, and are close to worst the assign price, but the guy doesn't get back until the middle of January, so I will have to see where things stand then. The guy I spoke to, a reference contact who is a masseuse at the Y, said he also knows where to get good Laptop's for cheap, as low as $1,000. That would rock. Now, I am going to go to sleep as it looks like I am getting up very early to go to the CGC and then to Student Aid to drop off the stuff in the hopes they can fit it into their meeting,m which I assume will be tomorrow. Night.

Here is something I heard about first from what I have come to call the Thompson Security Service(Bob has been passing on info en masse to his subscribers), and I hope not many got suckered by it. The 'it' I have referred to is the PayPal-Secure scam, in which many paypal customers got an email asking them to update their info, for their convenience, and in return they would get a $5 credit. I did not get one, as a PayPal customer, but I know a few who did, though none of them actually bought it.

Damn it! I knew this would happen one day soon. You remember awhile back when I said I had categorized my Spam, by the level of crawling the spammer or the list owner had done? Well, one of those spammers has, I think, gotten the Bad Trans Virus. In the last 2 minutes I have received 2 copies of BadTrans from the same email, and at both the Webmaster(which is how it used to be) and geek email addresses. if you own jasonandathena at adamswells dot com, please clean your system, and if I am wrong about the spammer label, please accept my apologies. As well, you will be receiving a similar request form your ISP.

Well, the layout of the Bloggies site, basic as it is, is complete. Now all I need is the underlying scripts. Check out the index(which will be left as is other then adding wished for blogs) and the nominate page. If you know how to write perl scripts, or if you know someone who does, please let me know. I want to launch this thing no later then January 1. Thanks for the help to Keith, who has corrected my errors in code and has suggested a number of excellent sites for addition, all of which are now on the index page.

I hoped. I even rejoiced. When I heard about the admitted problems with all versions of Windows all the way back to 98 first edition, I thought 'yay!' cause I thought I found the solution to my computer problems that I am willing to admit seem to have been immediate, versus gradual. Well, I tried to install the patch from the Microsoft site and it told me I had a version that did not need the patch. Damn it. Next option is a format and installation of Pro. On that saddening note I am off to bed as soon as TSS is over as I have to be up early to go to the Y, then to CGC to get the assessment(s). Night(for good)

Blah. Today is not my day, but at least not a lot can go wrong from here on out. I woke up at 11(if you recall, I was planning on waking up at around 5:30) and rushed off to the CGC to get the paperwork, then rushed to the Student Aid office to drop the paperwork off, only to be informed that it would likely be at least 2 weeks before a decision is made. This means It will likely be more than a month until I see there actual financial proceeds of my application, if it is approved. Then I rushed home to get my water, and then off to school where I proceeded to sit and read. The good thing is that I have no work to do here, and anything I do will be purely out of joy, not out of obligation. Yay! We have our dinner in a couple of hours, then we are done and able to go home if we want. I think I will want to.

"Computers are an ideal interest for people with Aperger's Syndrome... They are logical, consistent and not prone to moods" That from the previously mentioned article on Autism and Asperger's Syndrome from the December issue of Wired. Is it also odd for me, as that is my opinion of why I prefer working with computers instead of people, women in particular. <g>

Well, I passed the Practical test, with a score of 65%. He seemed to actually be concerned with how I was feeling, and granted me leniency for that. Had I been feeling better I would have done better, I have no doubt. I think I may have wasted the 35 minutes I did, even worse then before. The error I kept getting when trying to uninstall AD after accidentally deleting DNS first, looks in retrospect to have been an unrelated problem. This means that reinstallation of DNS appears to have been unnecessary. Damn. I would have had a lot more success, and maybe even gotten more then 70% if I hadn't encountered that problem, and wasted my time with unnecessary stuff, like the above mentioned and DNS name errors that annoyed everyone in the room.

I'm convinced. I do really know where it began, but it is out of control. I need.. *shudder* glasses. I don't care where the money has to come from, but I need to get some soon. I think the reason this has not cropped up sooner is that I have never spent so much time looking at a computer screen per day. This means I think I will be spending an exponentially lower amount of time in from of ther computer, maybe even as little as a few minutes a day. I guess this will give me more time to catch up on reading and studying. That also means there will be less here and even less on the hacks, as they take longer. It also means that the beta will pry not be ready to launch on the first, nor will the planned comments. See you all soon.

Plans have changed. I was expecting to go to Justin's today to begin the tutoring, or at least look at were we should begin. Unfortunately Justin has plans that have changed which apparently were to go see LOTR early today, around noon. Unfortunately his friend can;t make it for noon, so they have gone to see it at 4:15. Therefore we have rescheduled for a shortened version tomorrow. I do not expect much more then a couple hours, and most of that will be us figuring out where we need to go and where I am in my understanding. We shall see. I kinda wish I was going with him, cause I really want to see LOTR. I guess I I will have to wait 'til I have the funds. $4.25 to see it in matinee at the Garrick.

Ok, this is a little odd twist to the latest plots on Buffy. It makes hardly a mention of the love/hate between Buffy and Spike, but instead looks at the poor financial planning of the girl just brought back from the dead. I am not sure what I think of the analysis, though it is not unexpected seeing as the name of the site is bankrate.com, but I think that this goes too far in it's analysis of the show. Yes, it has had a lot of great lessons for kids, but is there not somewhere we should draw a line? I mean analyzing her use of money? She died and then got ripped out of heaven, only to discover she is no longer human, I don't think money troubles and financial planning are tops on her list.

Here is my prospective book. What do you think? I like the title 'Hacking Everyone' personally, but I am not sure what you all think. I also doubt that Tim or his employees would go for the title, never mind that I know a little less then most about the acts of hacking. Create your own O'Reilly book, like Patrick Scoble did, and present to the world what you would write about.

As I look through my Hard Drive to see what I would need to back up, and what I really don't need right now, in the eventual need of mine for a reinstall of the OS, or the upgrade to(or format and fresh install of) 2000, and I noticed something. The log files I download from Trinic on occasion, they are now up to 53.4 MB. That is from the end of August till now. Wow is an understatement. Of course the file that Web Trends puts out are up to 22.1 MB themselves, so that is a sign. I am not nearly complete in my decisions of what to back up, but I am a little closer.

I figure I can repartition about 500-750 MB of space, but I am not sure what exactly what I want to backup exactly. The site files, all three folders for them(Beta, normal and Archived which holds the raw log files), as well as the files for the business site. I think I will try to save the installation of Dreamweaver, as I think it might only need a serial number(based on something I found when I had both Server and Pro installed at school) and I do want to wait until I have this Seti unit done, because I have already put over 500 CPU hours in and would find that a supreme waste of time if I let it go without completion. At an average of 22 hours per day, the remaining 200 or so hours will only take until the 3 or 4th.

That gives me plenty of time to install Pro and get it running adequately before I go back to class on the 7th. Mind you all of this is still just ideas and ideals, so things may change greatly between now and then. I can say that the more time I take off from the computer means more time Seti has to complete it, which means I install sooner. I just wonder whether or not installing Pro on this machine is the wisest thing to do seeing as I still only have 64 MB of memory and that surely cannot be enough to run it, can it? Maybe installation of the 128 MB SDRAM stick on the table might make it better. We'll see, I guess.

I forgot to mention, I sent off an email to OpenSRS, the registrar side of Tucows for who Trinic is a reseller, and asked for info on self management of domains, instead of the management that Trinic thinks they are doing. I will let you know as soon as I hear something, though I suspect I will begin school again sooner then it takes them to get back to me as they are apparently in the midst of a move from the bankrupt Exodus to IBM.

A hack is up. I am off to bed. Good Night.

I hate not being able to sleep. A few things are on my mind, and some of those I will share. I am currently tuned to YTV-W, which is the western Canada version of the Youth Television Network. Right now there is an hour long ad for Microsoft on. I am sorry, but I don't care what time it is on, I do not want to see this kind of thing at any point of time. The 'show' is called 'Microsoft's .NET Show' and they have some guy from MSDN on and he is saying all this great stuff about .NET. Once he admitted that the new C# 'can run on a Linux box running an Apache Web Server' but the mention was significantly less clear and strongly stated. I know there is an ideal called free speech(not like Microsoft believes in it) but why do they not have a Linux Show on there? I know, because Microsoft has likely paid millions for this hour of uninterrupted airtime and Linux could never afford that.

I am sad to admit this, but it looks like Keith was right. I have searched for a few days not for a decent, free award script, and most of them seem to be for a contest, or a one question poll type of award. Does anyone out there know where I can get a decent script? I would really like to at least open up the nominations, for which I have found a few decent form mail tools, but I still need an awards/voting script which can handle up to 20 questions with up to 20 options per question. If you need a reference, check out the Blog Awards page I have laid out, and that will give you a basic kind of worm it will be. After that, pleas,e I ask and maybe even beg, please contact me and we can work something out. I need this by the end of January, preferably sooner, so I can run the awards on time, and announce the winners by the end of February.

The second thing I wanted to mention is an interesting article Dave wrote about Blogging, called 'A Weblog Manifesto' and it is very well written. Dave gives credence to a lot of different people and sites, from those who agree and disagree. Now, that said, I would like to know, from him, why exactly he seems to have completely ignored my email and my awards. I know I am not even a blip on his blog screen, but he could have at least replied with a 'fuck off' if he did not have any interest. I would also like to know why he offered 'I'm willing to help other people get their awards pages going' as well as offering his server up for use if he was only meaning 'I offer it up to those I know and/or support'. He can;t even claim ignorance, as I emailed him to discuss this.

I like Dave, overall, as I like to read many others, like Doc, Keith, Evan, Craig(when he posts) and the other 20 or so people I read in a day, excluding Daynoter's, but this has disappointed me beyond belief. I was expecting that Dave would happily help an awards get started that encompasses the entire Blogging world, but perhaps I was wrong on this. Dave says "How interesting because I don't see our sites getting very much in the way of recognition." and I really do hope he was not quietly referring to this site as many will know I have frequently linked to and mentioned Dave and his circle of friends. I think that a lot of the blogs Dave mentions are great sites and Dave has provided me with half my blog list, but when he regards a fellow blogger, even a blogger which is on a much lower level then he is, it makes the whole Blogging community seem to be no more then a loose knit group of writers, comprised mostly of a bunch of big wigs who occasionally bless a newer or less experienced blogger with the odd link. When I began Blogging it was to enable blogging from school. Then I did it, even from home, because it was nice and easy to do. Now I honestly don;t understand what I an doing this for, cause the joy is gone.

Evan has made some interesting points in regards to Lawrence Lessig's article in Wired about copyrights and the length thereof, and I am not going to take away the points he made, as many are quite valid. I read that article and I also agreed with most of what Lessig says, especially with the length of the current growing copyright lengths(sitting at 95 years beyond death I think) and these are ridiculous in most cases. If a book has been out of print for 10 years, and there are no new copies available in any store in the country, why should the copyright still be held? If no one is going to make new copies, for a price, then why shouldn't people be able to make copies for free?

As for software, which is a whole different ball game, I am not sure what my opinions are now. Lessig makes what I thought were some valid points, but reading Ev and Dave's separate, yet similar comments on the subject, both of whom I admit made excellent points about why software should not be forcibly open sourced after a specific amount of time, and why source revelation should not be a part of the copyright of software, I am not sure what I think. I think that something's, like an OS code, should be opened up, after a certain amount of time, but maybe something that is user differentiating, like PhotoShop, or Frontier, should not be so quickly open sourced.

I would love it if software makers would be as gracious as Id Software, which just opened up the source to the Quake 2 engine, and has opened up engines for the engines behind other games they do like Wolf 3D, and the original Quake, but I highly doubt that Microsoft will ever open source their code while they have any decent market share, or a computer that can run it decently. Yeah, you can pry get DOS and Windows 3.x free, but Windows 95 should be in the public domain, even if it is controlled partly by a MS sponsored foundation, so that the code can be improved for those in developing nations who may not be able to deal well with a BSOD or Illegal Error coming up so frequently, as we all know from frequent use of the Win 95 OS. What does Microsoft have to lose other then reputation and face?

Well, maybe the third time will be the charn, as the last two tries of getting some much needed shut eye failed miserably. I hope to not be posting here until 10 AM at the earliest.

Well, my day has been pretty damned boring, so I think I will do some writing. I am not sure which Comment I will begin with, but I hope to get at least on done today. My apologies to anyone who took offence to my rant over the treatment some of the lesser known members of the blog community get, but I had to say it. I do not take it back, even if I am derided and flamed for it, but it is still the truth. Some of the big wigs in the community treat the rest of us like second class citizens. The community has great amounts of potential, and I know it is not humanly possible to read every single blog out there, but at least acknowledge when someone is trying to improve a process, even if it is your process to begin with. Otherwise the community will fall apart like any poorly built structure.

Hey, Dave, thanks for proving me wrong.

From: "Dave Winer" <dave at userland dot com>
To: <Webmaster at geeksworld dot net>
Subject: Hi!
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 14:05:22 -0800

I just read your blog, I would be happy to help, I already have a server
that does what you want, and I could arrange for it to email you results
every night. I'm winding down for the holiday -- but if you want to point
your form at my server, after I get back, I can set it up. Happy to do so.
Dave

This has provided me with a lot more faith in the better known bloggers. Once again Dave, thanks.

Anyone want to help me with the code for this site? I know something must be lagging it, but I don;t know what. The removal of a lot of the pre defined code that came with the template in the CSS section helped a lot, but now it is loading very slow again. It can;t be the text, as other blogger blogs load super fast with more text on the page, and there are only like two images. So where is my latency? I have looked over the code more times then I can count, and have run it through half a dozen HTML editors looking for errors. but nada, nothing, zip. I can pass a copy of the template over to anyone interested, so please feel free to ask.

Another thing I need help with, is to know if anyone out there knows how to edit the dictionary used for spell checking by OE and Word. I have added a few words that shouldn't be there, ones I mess up on a lot, and I want to delete them. Anyone who knows, please tell me as I have been told those are very evident, since at least once a day that error shows up and I don't notice until such time as someone points it out to me. Thanks again.

Oh, cool, and I also got a link from Dave. That is a cool thing. Thanks even more.

Hey, Keith, as I use Blogger, and I cannot add posts in between others(one made at 1:30 AM must go after one at 1:00 AM of the same day), all posts will be in chronological order. If the post is higher on the day's posts, then it was posted before, but if it was posted lower, then it is after. I just saw no use in putting times especially when those interested in my being asleep at a reasonable hour(hi mom) might be reading, and I wouldn't want them to know a post showed up at 5:30 AM and said I was just going to bed. Without time I could say I went to bed at 12:15 and it would still show up on the same day, understand? Anyway, yeah, Dave said we would work something out after the holidays, so that totally rocks.

One thing I forgot to say, Welcome to any and all visitors who came over from Scripting News. This site is not much, and my opinions may be completely wrong, but I encourage people to prove me wrong, cause if you don't prove me wrong I will never learn. This blog, my friends, is about both of us learning from each others.

It is almost Christmas Eve day, and I seem to have completely lost any Christmas spirit I had at month's beginning. I find I am more then a little unmerry today, but I hope that will change come tomorrow night. I don't have any idea what if anything I am getting, but I do know the kids should have fun based upon the mass quantities of toys they should be getting. On that note, I am off to bed(yes, before midnight) as the hack is complete and uploaded. Have a good night, and a Merry Christmas in case I don't catch you back here between now and your celebrations. Night.

Afternoon to you. Yes, I had planned on going to the Gym, but hell, sleep was more pleasant then getting all sweaty and pruned. Therefore I just woke up, and I have found a really cool thing to mention n my first visit of the day, which is always User Friendly. I like the idea of laughing at a bunch of cartoon geeks first thing in the morning. Well, Illiad did not let me down this morning in the least, though in a touchy feely way, not a comedic way. He put up a cartoon and I would post it here, but instead I will post a link, found above, which I really do recommend to you all. Not funny as usual, but one of those touching things, like the comic from UF I just recently removed.

Hello.

As I write this it is Christmas Eve, where the culmination of a lot of stuff that has been going on this year comes to a head. I want to thank everyone who helped me with the site, and make no mistake, most of you have helped in some way to make my site as good as it is. This has been an interesting year, with switching from the bought out Pangea, over to Trinic, along with a lot of new sections and services. It's hard to believe that the site has been up less then 2 years and alsready soem are calling the site a full service tech site. I thnk the site has grown a great deal, and not a lot of it bad. The forums have been the onyl thing I have questioned the investment in, and all other sections have been a great help to the many visitors. Ihave unfortunatly neglected soem sections more then I had hoped, but I plan to improve that come the new year and the hostign troubles are soem how reolved.

The coming year heralds a new look, not too far from the current one, and hopefully a more inportant presence in some of the things that we do. I plan to make this site a major presence in the communities it currently belongs, and make it a presence in soem potential communities that it woudl belong in. The pay the bills stuff will hopefully stay as is, without any more ads like we have now. The last year in the world has been a wild ride, and there has been a lot of tragedy, but the human race is a strong one, and we will go on, we will be strong, and I hope my site is a primary focus of that strength.

In closing, I want to wish you all a grat Christmas, and Hanukkah if that is what you celebrate, and a great new year, whenever you celebrate it. I bid you all a farewell, and hope I will see you all back here often and always in the year 2002 and beyond.

That is my open letter to all I know and respect via emails and site visits, as well as all of you, my readers, whom I thank and admire for your patience and understanding as I grow into the webmaster and poster you can all respect and know. Merry Christmas.

Here is a post I found on the Security Focus mailign list, Focus Linux, in regards to a request for information on locking down a Linux 7.2 Server(it is assumed to mean Red Hat Linux 7.2 Server).

Yeah,

1) Institute a firewalling policy either using either ipchains, or perhaps
ipfilter if you want to use stateful packet filtering.

2) Kill ALL non needed services from inetd. Many come enabled by default,
and are entirely insecure. Things like pop3 servers, rpc, ftpd, telnetd
ect all can be disabled from either the rc startup files (found in etc) or
in inetd.conf
often found in /etc/inetd.conf

3) Install SSHD 3.x and set it to run, so you can remotely access and
congfigure things.

4) If you want, openwall patches, or patches for the kernel based on those
patches, are nice additions to deal with buffer overflows, gcc trampolines
and the like.

5) Enabling tcp_syncookies and rp_filter are good ideas. Most distros have
those enabled by default however.

These are the first things that come to mind when I think of securing a
Linux machine. If you need help to get those particulars working, or more
information, please email me personally and I can help you in depth.

Hope this helps,

Jon Larabee

While perusing the previously mentioned thread, I have found a few posts that have good tips. There is one from Ajai Khattri, which is an eight point instruction, while José Luis Domingo López tells of how to set up a packet sniffing box in the simplest way. One person points to Securing and Optimizing Linux: Red Hat Edition -A Hands on Guide which is a resource I had missed and it looks to be a great one at that. That's one I will have to try to get printed out. Alvin Oga has a rather lengthy checklist, along with many questions in need of answering, about creating an IDS portal at the connection between a network and the internet. This shows you the great stuff that can be had from subscribing to mail lists like these. I recommend you check out Security Focus, and subscribe to one of their many lists, but be warned, some of them can pump out hundreds of messages per day.

I just took a deeper look into the Free Find reporting, and it is interesting to see the stuff that is happening. Thursday December 6th has been the best searching day since the free find service has been available on the site, and the three top words used in a search term are Norton, crack and XP. Now, I am not expert, but that is a bad sign for this site when at least 94 people are looking for illegal means with which to use a program, that is unless they are looking for the best way to crack an egg.<g>

That's it for the next few days. I will likely post a round up of what, if anything, I get for Christmas, and I may do some beta designing tomorrow when I finally get home, but for the most part I will not be back until the 26th or 27th. On that note, have yourselves a great night, and morning, and I hope Santa brings you lots of good stuff like you want. Have a good night and a great couple days. Don't forget, one of the most important things about this time of the year is that we spend time with family and friends and other loved ones.

Hey. 10 CD R's in slim jewel's, a beautiful Polar Fleece and a whole shit load of junk food. That is my Christmas goods. Oh, and the best present I got? The chance to play Christmas morning and Christmas Eve Santa. That has got to be the best present I have ever received. I have never had the change to hand out presents at Christmas time, as that has always been my Father's job come this time of year. I have wanted to for awhile, but I know it has always meant a lot to my father to do this, but this year he actually told me to. I didn't have to ask, my mother and father both told me to do it myself. I am not sure if this is because I have no one else,. and both my brother and sister have family, or because my father decided it was time to let soemone else do it, but I really did enjoy it.

My sister, I found out this morning, emailed Shawn last night with a very rude letter in response to his expected no show tonight, for the like 12th family gathering in a row. I also admit I am not too pleased about it, but I was quite surprised along with her that he actually seemed interested in coming, though it appears he thought he was being told to come, not asked. I would have preferred it if he felt like wanting to come, but that he was planning to do so was a big change and a great thing. The unfortunate thing that happened is that by the time my father and I left to bring all of my stuff home at 9:30 or so he hadn't shown up.

My father told me not to call him and tell him not to worry, so I am not sure of that was out of anger at Shawn not showing up, or out of an unsaid understanding that we all know that my mother and brother need to talk, as it has been too long since that has happened and there is a lot to be worked out. I really hope they take the opportunity, cause my family needs it. They are the only ones I have, and I do not like the arguments that are going on continually. I see my immediate family turning into my extended family, and I am sorry, but I do not need that, nor do my family. Most people spend time with family, but hopefully I have helped get my family talking again this time around.

That is about all you are going to get tonight, either here or the Hack's, as I am just not in a writing mood. I have some reading I want to do on the NT 4 stuff, in preparation of the tutoring next weekend. I may write up a comment on Tech employment, but that will be the most I am going to write for the next 12-18 hours or so. I imagine when I wake up, whatever time that ends up being, I will write something here, and I might even write up a hack tomorrow, but for now I am taking my holidays, and I am taking a Christmas break. Take care.

Ok, I lied. I have set up the Nomination's page the only way I know how. It is emailed to me in a very crude and impolite way, but the script I downloaded only had info on setting it up on a Unix box, and required info that I won't even bother asking Trinic for as they are quite obviously not willing to host my sites anymore. I have sent multiple emails requesting they let me know when they can push through the registration for January, and I will UPS a check to them, but obviously they do not want my business. I am also not convinced they did not yet get my check for December. Oh well, if they want to do this I can simply move the site again. If I get the control I want from OpenSRS I will not need to even do that.

On a narrowly related topic, I have decided that when I move to my brother's hosting service, where I will surely get better treatment overall, I will be moving the blog to a self hosted blog software, like Greymatter or something. What I am wondering about is how easy it is to migrate from blogger without losing any posts. At the very least I do the switch right at Midnight at the end of a week and hand code the archives to the new page, keeping the Blogger generated pages. I would really rather not lose the past posts, though I get the feeling it will be inevitable. If any of you know of how to move from Blogger to a good Unix based server side blog tool, please let me know, and in the meantime, I would love it if you would all flood my mailbox with real nominees for the Inaugural Geek Blog Awards.

Pardon my crude language, but Holy Fuck. I was just perusing the 2.5 MB log file form Christmas Eve, and I noticed a number of referrals from Scripting.com, Dave Winer's Blog. I decided to run a find, and began the slow process of working through the referrals to see how many I got from him. The most I have gotten from one site in a day was 23. I figured 50 would be an awesome mention, as I knew a mention on a BigBlog would get me busy, visits wise. I got to 50, and I was not even half way through the log file. Oh man. 75? Nope, passed that too. As I hit 88 and 90, I was getting a little anxious. Now I might add this was only a search for scripting, which also includes scriptingnews.userland.com, but near as I can tell it is one in the same. Either way, the 100+ referrals on Christmas Eve is amazing. I hesitate to say this brings me full fledged into the Blogging community, but it does herald a very new plateau for me and my site. Thanks again Dave.[A note: Weblogs.com only gave me 17 referrals that day]

Thanks also go out to Keith, who has set up an area where you can view his favorite sites in a frame(of which mine is one), and to Mike McBride, who pointed to my site back on the 18th in reference to the awards. I decided to toss out an email to him letting him know that nominations are now active. Thanks to you all who are referring to the Awards and to the blog because of them. I might add that I don't want to be picky, but I would love it if you'd all refer to my site as one of the following for consistency: Geek's World for the whole site, Geek Blog for the blog side, or Dwight if you want to refer to me personally. You could also call me Geek, but that is a tad conceited to my mind. Once again, thanks. Please toss my your favorite blogs and I will add them to the list, so that when it goes active around February, you can all see your favorite blogs in the list. Without your nominations of your favorites, this degrades quickly into an awards based on my own favorites, and that is taking a lot away from their potential. Thanks!

Wow. 26 already today and it is only 4 AM, and it has already gotten me over 150 new visitors, and almost 200. I get the feeling it could be more then Christmas Eve today, even though yesterday was deceptively slow. The log file for Christmas Day was bigger then the day before, but a lot of those were from 404's from Free Find looking for stupid files like directories within directories. For instance looking in Blog for the following path Blog/columns/columns/columns/Tips/Tips/tip09.htm. No wonder it comes up as 4000 files 'sampled' even with the exclusions. I think I need to do a flush of their previous index.

Welcome back. As you may, or may not, know, Blogger has been down since 7:30 this morning when it was discovered their site and network had been compromised. Evan says there is no direct evidence of password files being accessed, but it is obvious that there is great cause for concern and everyone has been advised to change both Blogger passwords and FTP passwords on their servers. I am not sure if what I have heard is true, but if they truly are keeping their password files in plaintext, then I would cetainly say it is irresponsible on the owner's part. Yes, it is free, but I still think the users have a right to expect a certain amount of privacy and security, as they have trusted Blogger with their FTP passwords, and in some cases this cannot be changed easily, if at all.

Oh, fun. Now posts made to blogger are not being uploaded. Damn it. I will post all as soon as I possibly can, but it is safe to assume I may not get these up for a few hours at least. I really do wish Trinic ran a Unix server so I could run MT now. From all I have seen this software that Keith recommended is the ideal software, and the closest thing to what I have always wanted. I wouldn't have to worry about importing posts if the blog community actually got together on a standard file format for posts. Anyone else think this is needed or even possible??

Oh, I forgot to ask, does anyone know of a place where I can just check out the UI for Movable Type as well as other blog tools? I would like some that just let me see what it looks like and what kind of stuff I can do. That would likely cement the decision in this endeavor. Thanks.

I thought my search requests were more then a little odd. Disturbing Search Requests has soem truly weird stuff. I am not obsessed with my referral logs, but I do occassionally, like the last few days, go through and see where things are comign from. Usually I would just look through the site log summary sent to me by Trinic, but unless it is a week end day(Saturday's) they mostly come up as 24KB in size, which means it shows as all 0's. I have given up on them producing a decent statistics report, and I usually go for the Web Trends ones, but my system has absolutely no resources to run it here, and the log files are getting to be much too big to email. It is amazing since the first log file I ever got from Trinic was 33 K. That is miniscule when compared to the 2.999 MB that I downloaded for the log file yesterday. I guess the site really has gotten better, or at least bigger.

Sweet. I just finished watching the movie Loser on Movie Central,.and I have to say, it is a great movie. Mena Suvari is truly a very talented actress, though I still have not seen American Beauty, which is apparently her best work. I have seen her in a few works, a couple when she was younger and a few of her more recent works, and I must say she is both beautiful and an excellent actor. As well, Greg Kinnear played his role well, making me hate him beyond belief by the end of the movie.

On a highly related topic, I told my mother on Christmas Day about now subscribing to Movie Central and the other channels and she got very mad and upset, the main sign of which is her saying she did not want to talk about it anymore. I tried to explain to her that the additional $10 a month was cheaper then the 3-4 movies I rented on PPV each month, but she was not paying attention in the least. I know money is more then a little tight right now, but I don't think it is too much to ask that I get to enjoy the time since I am goign to be in debt somewhere by the end of school anyway. I am expecting to be in debt by about $500 or so, hopefully less if I can work a little bit between now and the end of the school year, but unless I take RJ up on his offer(more on that later), I will be screwed.

On the topic of RJ's offer, perhaps I should explain. RJ and I spoke the other day on the topic of my dire financial situation, and he mentioned he works a second job on a dairy farm. I hadn't thought there was any dairy farms in the province. Shows what I know. He said he makes about $120 or so a day, working 12 hours a day. That is real decent money, but the problem I would have is the fact I would need to stay out there from Friday to Sunday, and I have tutoring one day per weekend. I could work out that I do one weekend at two days, and then work with RJ for two days, but I am not sure I am cut out for the kind of work he does. I guess we will have to see how much $250 in a weekend is worth to me.

Time to answer some of the searches from the last few days logs, alright? Ummm, hello? Might I inform the person who found my site by looking for 'Mandrake+8.0+Warez' should be informed that most of the stuff for Mandrake 8.0 is legally free, and they don't need to rely on the dwindling Warez community for such products. Dumb ass is the biggest understatement I could come up to describe this.

For the person looking for the Viper like car in Swordfish, it was a TVR Tuscan, and for those looking for pictures of Halle from that movie, well, check the porn sites.

For the visitor looking for kill ossama, amen and good luck.

For the many people looking different programs and games to crack, look elsewhere, as I will not point you to them in any way shape or form.

Boy am I honored to be #4 on a Daypop search for Blog. I would have thought a lot of others would have been higher up, but I guess most people refer to them as weblog.

Nothing here either for hacking of pagers, or , cracking, .stealing, or for exploitign any programs. Geek does not mean little puke looking to break the law.

As for Win98 problems on Shaw cable's internet service, well, they each have their own problems, and combined it is a lot worse.

For Outlook Express to Outlook, I won't do it, but I did show how to go back from Outlook to Express, so check that out if you want to revert.

On the topic of choppy mouse, I would say the possible problems are more then I care to count, but if you want, email me with more info and I will try to help.

Ahhh, here's a tip I can do. The person looking for info on why defrag won't work, I will assume it keeps restarting, and to solve this go into the sysedit.exe program, and change the system.ini line for the shell from explorer.exe to defrag.exe. Make sure you know how to get into DOS so you can get back into the file to change it back, or you will not be able to get into Windows again, as explorer.exe is the Windows shell.

Yes, I am a tech geek, this is a geek site, and I am a geek in general, but not an al queda site.

No, I never did figure out how to permanently get rid of index.dat file found in IE's temporary internet files. Sorry.

Computer Boulevard is located here. Computer Avenue, in case you care, is here, along with Designer Graphics here. I recommend the latter.

For blog awards, check out mine.

For the last one I will cover tonight(though I will be sure to do this again as it has been fun to challenge my off the top of my head knowledge, the search is How does Linus makes money. My best answer is Transmeta, the chip maker. To my knowledge that is his 9-5 job, but I am not sure what his actual title is.

Wow that was fun, but tiring. I only got half way through the page, and searches provide a huge number of visitors. I also did not do anything close to all of the searches that I found, as I will not post 15 copies of the same damend search(herein referred to as SDS), and the most common one had to do with cracking or hacking Norton. In the end it annoyed me to hell to see all of those, so I just ignored the hacking or cracking ones after the 10th. There were a lot, from hacking MSN to exploting AIM. Oh well. Tough luck to those who came into that.

Wow that was fun, but tiring. I only got half way through the page, and searches provide a huge number of visitors. I also did not do anything close to all of the searches that I found, as I will not post 15 copies of the same damend search(herein referred to as SDS), and the most common one had to do with cracking or hacking Norton. In the end it annoyed me to hell to see all of those, so I just ignored the hacking or cracking ones after the 10th. There were a lot, from hacking MSN to exploting AIM. Oh well. Tough luck to those who came for that. I should point out that those logs I took from were for today. About half a day since the logs begin around GMT, so in half a day it is that big. I am still shocked so many people are interested in my humble little site. Thanks to you all.

Well, it's almost 7:30, and I am only slightly tired, but I am too exhausted to go to the Y. What to do, what to do. Maybe I will jsut keep readign blogs and the MetaTalk thread about the Blogger hack, which has some very interesting comments and arguments. As well, one question that seems to be a good one, and frequently asked, is why was there no encryption of passwords on the server? Yes, a point was made about load levels, which are already high, and since the blogger server(s) have often been down because of that, but if the approximately 300,000 users had even half their FTP passwords kept on the server, that means a huge number of servers are now open and willing to be used to hack others. The zombies cometh, and the zombies hacketh away.

Errr... Morning? Well, it is for me at least, I woke up around an hour ago, and boy was that sleep nice. I really do like the sleeps when a few things come together perfectly. The first thing is I wake up before my alarm clock. If I am woken up by my alarm clock my day begins ruined. I prefer to be able to come out of dream willingly and happy. The second is that I feel well rested and not rushed when this happens, and three I am able to relax when I wake up. When these all come together, which rarely happens, there is nothing that can beat it.

Now to the topics of the day, and a slow blogging day it is. The run down for the last Linux Show of 2001 is laid out for tonight, which is a departure from the normal schedule, whihc is usually a Tuesday run. This year Christmas and New Years are on Tuesday, so therefore the change. I don;t generally have the time to listen to Linux show, but tongiht I may just watch, and I might even blog it<g>

God damned bloody automated telephone systems. I cannot begin to describe how pissed off I am. I just went out in the fresh snow and frigid wind to call Student Aid, and barring enough time and lack of frostbite, UPS to arrange a drop off of packaging materials. The former was the problem, and I never did get around to the latter. I assumed when I got the information from the receptionist at Student Aid that this was the number for the front desk where I could be tossed to Donna, the person I spoke to the other day, not the automated hell they operate, one that surely must be a joke on every caller. I resigned myself that I would have to find a way to get through to the receptionist, and see where I could get. I once thought I was on the way to the front desk of Student Aid, but then I got a message that all operators were busy and was tossed quite painfully back into the system, where I could not get the option to try again.

I am not sure if this is a hidden feature, wherein one failed attempt forbids any other attmpts, but it is surely not a good thing to do to people. At the very least they should have oen number for this system, and then another for the actual receptionist. I guess I will make plans to go to my mother's tomorrow, where I can hang up and dial again a dozen times if I want. This does not forbid me from the 4 quarter maximum I had on the coin line phone, all of which were exhausted in this effort in futility and annoyance.

Well, Ev said there'd be glitches, and I think I have either found a huge glitch, or a result of the hack. My template, when I try to edit it, is gone. I can post and it posts it right, but actually editing it(like I had planned to) is not possible. Damn it.[Update: Template editing is back up]

It seems that Blogger is not the only site that had problems over the Christmas holidays, with The Register falling victim to moronic employee at their hosting company. For a company that is such a huge name on the web, this is a big problem, though sadly not the first they have had. I can recall half a dozen times when their site has been offline for a certain amount of time, but to be offline for days is an affront to them and their readers. I do not care what the report says, I would threaten to move the site without at least a one moneth credit. Mind you I am also a greedy Winnipegger, so that could account for that viewpoint. I guess a mornonic employee is better then a purely ignorant company all together, though, cause at least the moronic employee can be fired, or get a financial penalty.

It seems to me that the longer I wait to finish the Beta, the longer it takes to do, the more I find I want to do. At this point I doubt it'll be done by the time the end of January comes around. That is ok since I doubt I will have everything ready to be turned over to Shawn's servers by then as well. I figure I will have three URL's total. Geeksworld.net will be the main site, Geekworldwebservices.com will be the biz site whenever I decide to start it up again, and geekblog.com will for this here blog. Based upon Shawn's pricing plan, I will pry get one account for each site(two up front).

I will pry add 20 MB to the main site, and add a mail list or two to the main as well. I want at least three mail lists on the main domain, GeekLine, TuxTalk and RedmondRhapsodies. the WinnipegWeblogs and NST lists can be deleted, as no one uses them anyway. The TuxTalk and Redmond have both had subscriptions in the last month, and geek line is my pet list, though it may be renamed. In the likely eventuality that some stuff does not go as well as I hope in the transfer, please check back here around mid February for any changes that might happen. Features may go, and hell we might even move to our forth different URL, but this site will always be.

Well, I have come to the conclusion I cannot mention my domain name plans here, because soemone keeps ripping them off. Needless to say, there are some changes in plans today as I try to figure out where I can go from here. I did a look up of the geeksworld.net domain, and it is registered under the email boss@geekworldwebservices.com. To reregister through Joker I need access to the email address it is currently registered under. This means I may have to get Trinic to bring back up that web hosting account, just so I can change the registrar.

The second hitch today is that someone registered the geekblog.com domain in early November. I set it up with Trinic in late October. Unfortunately until the payment is received they do not do anything, and do not guarantee anything will be available by the time the funds are received, but I wonder exactly what would have happened if they got the money for it. Needless to say, the domain situation is very dynamic right now, and is making me very nervous so I think I will just think about other stuff. If this site is not here one day, and neither is the Trinic account suspended page, then you know things have gone awry.

This is my response to Brent Ashley's comments on MS, another Microsoftie going over to Linux.

Subject: Why, you're Brilliant
Well, not sure about Brilliant, but you are catching on. The bad thing is the users, those average people who do the simple stuff, aren't seeing what both you and I have seen thus far about MS. I used to be a strong MS proponent, I even defended them during the early Anti trust suits, but as I got used to MS and began to look deeper into the practices and policies they have grown accustomed to using I began to see the beast for the monopoly they are. I can no longer defend them, and I cannot use their products in good conscience. I now use Windows only when needed, unfortunately with my current educational endeavors I need Microsoft more then I would prefer, but I still use Linux whenever possible. I am more user then administrator, but Linux has helped me begin to turn that tide.

Your blog post is great, and is the kind of thing that others I know, like Rick James in Ottawa, have begun to notice more and more as of late. If MS keeps up their current path they will find themselves to be even further out of the main stream then they did when they almost got caught with their pants down in the beginning got widespread internet use. I am not sure what I would prefer, the quick and dirty death of MS or the slow and pain free one, but the death will happen sooner rather then later. MS will learn what all behemoth's have, the world does not like giants. The only problem with their imminent death is how badly it will affect the global economics system. Too much is dependant on MS, or those in the lead of the economy prefer to believe so.

I would seriously consider Brent's blog for the awards, after reading a few pages from his site, but I would rather wait a bit and see how his posting goes. So far he had posted quite infrequently, but in the fine tradition popularized by Craig Burton, infrequent posts but great when they are there seems to be Brent's style as well. If I could see a post every 3 or less days for the next month, he would definetly be one my choices for the awards. Nonetheless, he is now in my first string blog folder, and I will keep a tab on his ongoing Linux trials.

Shit, as I go through and do some code clean up on the beta site, it is amazing to me how dirty the code has ogtten. Alot of fil:///C|/Dwight/Save/'s which show up as proper links in the site manager in Dreamweaver, but when online it shows a 404. I hope to god the actual code that is online isn't this dirty. Well, I guess I should have known better, and done this more often. Lessons learnt.[Over 300 links, though on about 5 main links and a few other lesser links. That meant that all I had to do was figure out what a link was supposed to be and fixing one solved a few dozen broken links. I will be sure not to let that happen again.]

Well, this is not good. I went to sleep at around 8 PM, and woke up around 11 PM(I was planning on being up at 9 PM) and was up until 6 AM. I tried to go to sleep then. It is now 7 AM. Shows how useful that attempt was. I stared at the wall for an hour. I jsut couldn't keep my eyes shut for more then a minute or two. I am not sure what the hell is up with my sleep ing schedule being all out of whack, but it really not good for me, and needs to be fixed before I go back to school. In the mean time, I have Cody coming here in about 6 hours, and this place is it's usual mess. Oh well, after seeing the kid's bedroom's whiule I was there, this place is nearly spotless by comparison. <g>

Morning... errr, Afternoon. Yeah, again. I wake up to the news that after the recent explosives in shoes method of terrorism, there is an increase in technology that can detect explosive materials in shoes. Am I missing something here? Before 09.11 I think we can all agree that airport security was an oxymoron for the most part. To think you would get equal security in all airports was certainly not a possibility in any way. After 09.11 measures were put into place to prevent security breaches with things as small as a knife or retractable razor(more commonly known as a box cutter) blade, and also put into place measure to make the plane's cockpit more secure. Now they put into place measures to stop people from using sneaker bombs. Excuse me?

If 09.11 would have shown us anything, it should have shown us that

• Terrorists are not concerned about themselves, only murder.
• Terrorists will always find some way around current security measures.
• By being reactionary, nothing will change, and more lives will be lost
• To stop someone not concerned about their own death, you must, and I mean absolutely, without a doubt must use extreme measures

Hey, I'm here. What do you want? Oh, a post, well fine then, I'll just put one up. On the more serious side, I am not sure what is up today as I have still seen no sign of Justin, nor do I have any email from him. I will take it to assume there will be no tutoring today. I will also assume he will want to do it tomorrow, but to commit to that I need to know when Tracy will be coming to get Cody, who is in the city visiting my parents and me this weekend. Oh well, we'll just have to see how things go. Either way I will spend a significant amount of time reading the NT book, in the hopes of writing the NT final by the 11th of January. Only time will tell.

Oh, I forgot to mention, here's a couple of articles, the last one I
think I forgot to mention, so here's a twofer. One article, titled 'Blogging
the World, Together' and the more recent one, finished last night, 'Tech
Employment in a Shrinking Industry'. I think both are good works, and
there are still two more to go. The one on privacy is going to be done tonight,
and that will give me two days to finish the Year in Review piece, which I
expect will be both extensive and brilliant. Hi ho, hi ho, off to write I
go.. See ya soon one and all.[Oops, links corrected, files uploaded]

At the risk of making an ass out of you and me, I will assume you may have heard by now the major rumor that the major labels are planning a major price cut in the cost of CD's. This is in response to the huge increase in file sharing and music piracy. One of the biggest complaints of those who share music is the exorbitant costs of digital music. When CD's first came out and became popular they were abut $25 a CD. Now, CD's cost $18 - $25 each. Odd how the usual standards of supply and demand do not apply to this area of the market, but the economics of breaking the law versus paying too high a price for a product that has if anything gotten worse over the years. The ratio of bad CD's to good has steadily decreased in the time since the CD first hit the market. Therefore, in the fine tradition of an opinion piece, I ask yours. How much are you willing to pay for a CD?[Ok, after fighting with the code for the poll for longer then should have been necessary, it is now working without any changes or customizations at all]

Well, that's about it for today. I am off to bed, as I plan to be up in about 5 hours to take Cody for a few hours at the Gym. See you all tomorrow, and enjoy the hack.

I have done it. I have figured out how to solve the greatest problem with a complete redesign. Redirection. The problem is that all these awesome search engines(primarily Google) have indexed my site as is. Unfortunately some, even Free Find, have indexed pages that do not exist, and may never have existed. Free Find's searches are the number one cause of 404's in my logs, up to 30,000 times a week. Unfortunately I am not sure how to go about having Free Find fix their obvious problems, so instead I will simply focus on helping Google and the others with their inevitable problems, which will happen when the new site goes live and the old site, with it;s current folder structure and all, dies away.

The key is the redirection tag available in HTML. What I will do is replace all the current documents with smaller(10-20 bytes each) versions of the current page, which will point to the newly named file in it's new location. For instance, the current file path for last night's post is /Daynotes/2001/12292001.htm. The new file path will be /Hacks/2001/12/29.htm. The current file will simply point to the new. This will prevent the many 404's that would be expected, which also happened when the site was down for a month and came back with many changes.

I can't do it. I cannot complete the Privacy comment, and the YIR one both by tomorrow night at midnight. I would like to be able to, but I know now I will not be able to. Sorry. I am just going to write the YIR one tonight and tomorrow, published at 11:59 PM, and then work on the Privacy one as the first of 2002. I hope this is ok, as it just means you wait a few extra days for the piece. I was planning on writing the comment last night, but I put up the Hack and then went to bed. Maybe I will write one tonight, as I did promise, but it won;t be much. I want to writer out the YIR and that one will be big, likely close to 100 K, as 2001 has been a busy year, both in my world, and in the international scene. So, until later, or tomorrow, good night. If not tomorrow or tonight do I see you here, have a good new year, and take care my dear friends.

Damn. The person I am conversing with via email from Trinic Support who is replying to my request for the usernames and passwords for the domain management through Open SRS. I ask for the info and he/she replies with excuses why I do not need them. I have tried to explain his a dozen times or so it feels like, and yet the excuses just keep coming. I get the feeling they think, and rightly so, that they have treated me badly enough for me to rant endlessly over the treatment and that I plan to leave their hosting, and he is being told to do all he has to do to keep my business. I guess maybe this is my impression, so I will let you decide.

First my email to them, and I will let you follow the path it leads. Mine in bold, theirs in italics. Ok? Let's go.

I would like the password and username that is used to manage the domains I have registered, the one used at this page. http://manage.opensrs.net/. I am told by OpenSRS that I should have gotten this when I registered the domains, but a look through my archived emails from you people, I have never gotten this. Thanks for the help.

Although we may use OpenSRS as our supplier for domain names, we have built and customized all our own systems for managing the products we offer. All aspects of your domain name can be managed through the Internet Manager located at http://manager.trinic.com/.

Although I do respect your wish for me to manage my domains through your own setup, if I were to want to move my domains you would want to charge exorbitant fees for DNS hosting. I will to be able to control this myself. According to the FAQ on their site, to access this I need to ask you, so I am asking politely for this username and password. These are my domains, and I have a right to them.

You incur absolutely no fees whatsoever for moving your domains away from us, or changing the DNS record on your domain name.

That changes nothing. I would still like to have the username and password, as I no longer have access to many of the email addresses I originally registered the domains under. Thank you.

If you are referring to the e-mail addresses on your domain name record, such as the Administrative Contact e-mail address, you can modify that information via the Internet Manager located at http://manager.trinic.com/.

I have changed it, but it has not reflected the whois on my domains. A whois on any of my sites shows only the original emails I used when registering them, for instance the geekworldwebservices.com site was registered with the boss@geekworld.ca email, which I no longer have access to. If I choose to change anything on my domains outside of your site manager I will not be able to because the emails are not matching.

According to OpenSRS, I am supposed to have access to the usernames and passwords for all of my domains, and I would like them. Nothing will change this in the least, so we can save a lot of time by you just giving me these. Thank you.

See what I mean? Relentless.

Wow, this has been a quiet blogging day, eh? The hack is done, longer then I expected, and now I move my complete attention to the YIR I want to get done by midnight. I will probably not post much here today, so please do not expect much, blogwise. See you all soon. Night.

You know you are a geek when... You think about problems with your latest coding work while doing other enjoyable things. Keith, when you take a break, you should actually take a break. *sigh* Programmers. I mean what will he be thinking about tonight?

I found it. I wasn't sure who provided me with the link to the 'Why I hate Microsoft' Essay that I mentioned last night, but it was Dave Markowitz, the newest member of the Dayntoes gang. I still plan to spend a couple days reading that through from beginning to end.

BlogCon??? It has been suggested, and asked for, but I thought a blogging conference would be a great deal longer in coming. I haven't looked into it more yet, as I am currently writing the very lengthy YIR piece, but there are a few things that hit me. What is it about Las Vegas that attracts geeks and other computer enthusiasts? I have seen dozens of shows pop up, and some die out, that happen in LV, most impressive of which is Comdex. I would say that I plan to go myself, but unless some stuff changes dramatically, I will not be there. Maybe next year(where have I heard myself say that before?). See ya back here soon.

After many freeze ups and multiple hard crashes, the comment
is done, and boy is it a long one. On closing, for my last post(begun) in
2001, The words to Auld Lang Syune, which I can never find on time.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days of auld lang syne?

And days of auld lang syne, my dear,

And days of auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days of auld lang syne?

We twa hae run aboot the braes

And pu'd the gowans fine.

We've wandered mony a weary foot,

Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,

Sin' auld lang syne,

We've wandered mony a weary foot,

Sin' auld ang syne.

We twa hae sported i' the burn,

From morning sun till dine,

But seas between us braid hae roared

Sin' auld lang syne.

Sin' auld lang syne, my dear,

Sin' auld lang syne.

But seas between us braid hae roared

Sin' auld lang syne.

And ther's a hand, my trusty friend,

And gie's a hand o' thine;

We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,

We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

Have a good one my good friends.

24.15.72.126, Leave me the fuck alone on all ports.

Here's what I just posted on the site for BlogCon 2002. "I really do not wish to mean any offence to you all, who have apparently worked long and hard to get this worked out, but the idea in and of itself is good, great even, but your description makes it sound like a party organized by a bunch of little kids trying to act grown up. I mean the whole preoccupation with nudity and raving, I just think this would be better done by those who know how to organize a proper conference, or just call it what it is, a party for a bunch of blog owners to get drunk in the city of drunks. Hope I didn't step on too many toes, but I really do like the idea, but not if all it is going to be is one big drunk fest." I know this will probably piss off the people planning it, but I stick by my opinions.

Ev says "Here's to a great 2002. As they say, may we live in interesting times*. And as I say, may we strive to make our lives interesting—and grow from the experiences. Cheers!" I say times are plenty interesting for me, and in fact I could use a toning down of these interestig times. I would really much rather have some uninteresting times for about the next dozen years, or so. Then we can go back to the interesting times, or maybe we could begin to work towards a more peaceful and less parasitical world. Likely? No. Possible? Anything is. Here's to your interesting times and a hope for better times, but my time is done for this day. I am sleeping in tomorrow to kick off the new year, and this time I really mean it. I won't be up until well past noon if I have any say in it.

Man, I think I am biting off more then I can chew again. I have spend the last little while trying to make one template for the entire site, and am trying to copy some of the content over to it. If this works as wel as I hope, all newer pages(hacks from Dec-present, all columns from mid '01 to present, all tips, all root pages, and so on) will be changed to the new one, but anything that is more of an archive will remain as it is now, except for making sure the links are all current and point to the right places. I am not sure how it looks, so I will upload the template here and you can all decide for yourselves. I am now really off to bed. See you all.

*Yawwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnn* Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That was great. Sleeping until one actually wakes up, not when one is woken up by one thing or another. Mind you this did require some rather odd measures to be taken, seeing as the neighbors still have not learnt proper apartment building etiquette, but it was good none the less. I wake up just in time to watch a little of Dune, and then Bicentennial Man, which is still a great movie. Not sure what kind of posting will be here, but I will try to post something in a day that will be completely packed with crashing Dreamweaver and trying to get some designing done. See you all soon.

I am not sure what exactly, or which ones exactly, are causing the repeated crashes and freeze ups, but I am thankful that the work unit for Seti is only 5% from completion, which is when I am planning on doing a complete format and install of 2000 Pro. There is only one hitch. I need all of the currently available HD space for the OS and other assorted software. This means I have no room for the 500 or so MB of space for the data I was planning on saving to reintegrate after reformat. I need to solve this problem, and soon.

The data includes stuff like emails from Outlook Express(I still have found no way to export the emails for importing later, so I am simply saving the dbx files and hoping they do not cause too many problems later) and all site stuff. I was going to save the files for Dreamweaver, but since I think it is screwing up right now as well, I will simply reinstall a new copy. So, on that note, if you know of anywhere I can safely toss 300-500 MB of data for a few days, please let me know, as I would like to save all of this and right now I cannot.

Ok, that's it. The beta is on hold until such time as I am able to reformat and get 2000 on here. Dream is now crashing and freezing up within seconds of a file being opened, if not before a file is opened up. I am not sure if it the shitty amount of memory, or lack thereof, but I can't do this anymore. I am patient, and I hope you all are as well, cause it will be the end of this year(2002) if I try to keep using it as is. I am still looking for a couple of 64 MB sticks of PC66 SDRAM, as the 128 MB stick showed as only 32 MB, so if you want to switch two sticks of 64MB for a 128, please contact me.

Oh, I forgot to mention you all, the installation of 2000, which will happen tomorrow if all goes as planned, means Linux is gone. Hopefully Merlin here will see it yet again, but for now I need all the 4 GB of HD space for 2000. As I write this I am prepping to reboot to finish applying the changes in PM to repartition to allocate the necessary space for backup data. I will probably not be back tonight, so I will see you all some time tomorrow. Night.

AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!! My computer crashed. My seti unit! It.. it...it's back at 0.40% of a work unit done. From 3% left to .4% done. This can't be! 700+ hours gone. Please Microsoft, just give it back, please? I am begging you! I won't talk down about Windows again, I promise!. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! I guess *sniff sniff* I am installing 2K now. See you all later.

Welcome to the new Geek, currently operating on Merlin 2000, and happy to say the least. More soon, after I set it up my own way.

I realize now that I was not entirely prepared to do a reinstall. I forgot to rearchive my address book as it stood(I really need to set that up as a weekly job) and a great number of other things that were missed and therefore lost. Overall this is up to where I want it, and with few bad surprises, though the good ones were plentiful. I am pretty sure that in the version of Outlook Express I was using in 98 SE it had some major problems with importing messages in that it could only import from a currently active Outlook installation, and exporting the same. Now I find in this version that I can import from outlook express's .dbx files which I backed up before I killed 98SE. I only wish I had found the location of the internet mail accounts files and message rules, so I could have backed those up as well. Oh well, one cannot always be perfect, and things are occasionally lost in such a troublesome transition.

Hey. Well, all the most important pieces are installed and mostly configured. It has hit me, once again, that you never really know what you really use on a computer until such time as you need to install it again. I have installed an SSH client, Dreamweaver, SnapIt!, Seti, and all of the various win*'s(amp, rar, zip, and more). It seems like the world is getting back on track for the most part, but I notice one person who I wish would be at work today, is still on holidays, apparently taking the same time off my mother has. I got a ride at 1:30 to Student Aid from Tracy, but the person I needed to talk to is not in until Monday.

I guess she does deserve her holidays, but from my perspective her two weeks off make my need worse then it was. Justin needs to know what is up, and is getting a little worried himself to the point of offering me a ride to the office, and will probably not be too happy to hear the delays will be longer then we ha hoped. This means that I will give her until noon on Tuesday, and then I will stop by to see what is up. I really do wish things were a lot more advanced, but hopefully there is only one step left, which is them deciding to approve all part of the application.

Awesome. Chris is one person I have been looking forward to seeing a Blog from for quite awhile. I saw LockerGnome for the first time awhile back, and became a true fan of his when I began watching CFH when TechTV Canada started four months ago. Chris is, well, weird, freakish and very knowledgeable, so I think he will only liven up the Blog community. Now that Chris joins Leo in the Blog owners group out of TechTV, we need to see if we can convince Patrick Norton and Megan Morone to blog, we will have what I think would be a great blog mini community. Welcome, Chris, and I hope to read more of what I have seen on CFH and LockerGnome.com in this Blog. Oh, and C:\PIRILLO.EXE is a great name too.

Oh Cool. Proof that blogging is addictive and contagious. Chris's wife, Gretchen, is now a blogger too. Who next? Their pooch????

Ok, everyone is syndicated, everyone is using RSS and XML feeds, and I feel like I am the only one who doesn't. The good thing is that www.geekblog.com is now mine, and I hope to soon have it set up as a MT blog. I will keep the subdomain for this blog on the geeksworld site for a bit until such time as I figure out MT when Shawn gets it up and running. That should be sometime around the middle of the month, and I will be talking to Shawn at the MUUG meeting to see what he has done to look into this. Since I do not plan to set up the GeekBlog.net site with hosting under Trinic, I can just point it at Shawn, and try out the MT stuff before the hosting here at Trinic is done. The only problem is we all know what happens to the best laid plans....

They are at it again, and they are mad this time. Microsoft, who has had some major public defections of formerly strong Microsoft advocates, and after the revelation of an email a short while ago by The Register, Microsoft has been shown to be more insecure and distrusting then ever before. In an email, once again released to the public by The Register, Microsoft is shown to be putting down Linux and instructing sales associates to "We have to be more hands on and dig deeper in your accounts!" including walking through their clients shops and asking questions that are meant to make the client feel less then great about themselves for even considering choosing something other then the all mighty Microsoft.

Obviously the repeated rants on security and privacy, thee letters still get released, and all I can say is good. If MS thinks they can bully the market and clients like this, then the Open Source Community will deal just as strongly with them. I encourage each and every Linux advocate and consultant take this email to heart and reverse it on MS. Go through your clients shops and ask them why they still run such insecure and bug riddled software. Point out to them the benefits in cost and support of using Linux and offer to let them try out Linux on a test box, just so they can see how easy it is. Let's show MS what a true challenge Linux is.

So, Keith, you want something more fun and challenging to work on, eh? <bg> Let me see what I can come up with for some ideas.... Heee heeee heeeeee heeeeeeee *hack, couch hack*

Mike is wondering why people are so surprised that Grokster, and many other file sharing programs, place Trojan viruses and other security compromising stuff on your hard drive. This has been discussed to great lengths on the Security Focus mail lists, but I share the mindset of Mike when he points that people should not be surprised with software that allows other people access to the contents of your hard drive and is generally used to break the law in many cases. Sorry, but I just cannot find an sympathy within my technical mind for those who get hacked because of a need for illegal songs/programs/files.

I was just looking through the logs for today, and all I can say, as a long time Wintel user, is AHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh too many Mac's! My eyes, they are hurting from seeing those cursed three letters. Please, at least disguise your computer as a Linux box, after all it is BSD underneath in OS X, I know it is possible, and I should be abel to help.... There, that should rile up Batgrl since I dissed her PowerPC.

Ok, I just saw a clip of Garth Brooks talking about the music piracy craze and all that shit, and be sure that's what it is, and I must say I am disappointed in Garth. I thought he had more regard for his fans, both those who can afford the $25 or more a CD and those who cannot, as well as those who use MP3's for listening of their own CD's on much more versatile and dynamic MP3 players. I have known Lars Ulrich of Metallica and others were greedy assholes for a long time, only worried about how big their royalty checks are, but Garth, I never thought I would hear this from you. Therefore, and Open Letter to Garth Brooks, Lars Ulrich and all the other greedy music creating bastards. Here goes.

God, I hate nights like this. I get these nights when I am so totally displeased with the look and feel of my surroundings that I have to change it. The problem is usually this is requiring me to move the heaviest thing in the room. In this instance it has been the Desk. Several times. I think I may find myself heading to the Y in a few minutes, seeign as they are open in about 15 minutes. That is only if I do not get out of this mood, cause I still haven't slept yet, and I need to get myself back in the school sleep schedule, because I begin on Monday and my schedule is way out of whack.

I just saw a great thing on the news explaining what a lot of businesses in town are doing with the new smoking bylaw here that says you cannot allow smoking in a place where there are minors. A lot of businesses that rely on smokers, like coffee shops and deli's, are now banning minors. The story went on o say there will likely be a challenge of these bans based on human rights violations. The reporter quoted the human rights rep as saying 'the obligation would be on the business to prove the necessity of banning minors' The reason, at least from my perspective, is simple. Bankruptcy.

The Coffee Time on St. Mary's Rd. was non smoking until 5:15 when they did their final totals for the day shift. They immediately went no minors, as they could not afford to keep the smokers out. Soup, Sandwiches, and More on Graham says they will strongly consider doing the same as they have taken a major hit. To say Glen Murray has made a big mistake, one which will affect youth employment as well as some have already been laid off or being minors, is an understatement. He says 'it is sad that businesses are choosing smokers over children' and I say it is too bad Glen Murray has chosen Political Correct over the cities small businesses. He sold them out, and they are only doing what they must to stay alive.

Ok, so Apple is apparently going to be entering the PDA biz. Oh, wait, that's all an elaborate hoax, and Apple wouldn't lie, because they just don't hoax. But wait, they also don't hype, and boy have thery been hyping. So, what is going on? A major hype campaign leading up to the pre MacWorld San Fransisco keynote by Steve Jobs. We shall see, won't we.

NSync as JedI?????????? My God! What are you doing George? I am not as adamant a star as soem out there, and surely there aare peoepl who could point out flaws in each movie and book from the Star Wars series, but even I have a slight problem with these prety boys playign Jedi Warriors. There have been calls to have Peter Jackson, the man who has brough LOTR to life, make trhe third movie in the Star Wars series, and thus also allow the 7, 8, and 9th movies be doen as wel, and I am for the first time inclined to agree.

God this is boring. I was planning on going to bed early so I could get to my mothers at a decent time after getting my GST money, which I might point out is still not in my account at 4 AM. So far I got so caught up in log analysis and editing to point out the the support person from Free Find where exactly the problems seem to lie. The problem is that their spider looks at pages that aren't there, but since it does get the 404.htm file, it thinks it has found a page. The only thing I can come up with to solve this is to take out the customized 404, and just let the thing get it's errors, unless Trinic puts their own in any way. We shall see. I just eliminated the customized 404, and now I am moving the aspcomments files to non cgi-bin directory cause it was annoying me. Long story.

Ok, was it something I said, or something I didn't say? I know I am not Dave, but I would have thought my Awards site would have had a bit more mention and visits. I have received no nominations, but I know the form works as long as you have some email program recognizing mailto: links. So, I want to know, why does no one care about these awards? I mean if only me, Keith and Dave will vote, there is hardly any use in holing voting, is there?

Well, I am not sure which of the three steps I took today has solved the problems I was having, severe as they were, with FreeFind's crawls, but they are solved. My site is now being spidered not sampled, and is returning just under 300 pages instead of well over 3000. Awesome. Now, if I can get back to the numbers I had previously, I will be happy. See, since the 29th of December I haven't had a day of searching over 10, and most below 5. I had one above 5. It was 8. 5 were me. Compare this to the low's of 25 I was getting for the entire month of December. 'Nough said. [Maybe other blog awards should be your choice for voting and nominating instead]

One last thing I wanted to mention, or actually ask, is if anyone out there knows how easy it is, or if it is even possible to import comments from aspcomments to Moveable Type? I was wondering this as I prep to go to the gym, and was catching up on Leo's new blog in it's new location now that he is using Moveable Type. I saw he imported his, which I assume is a feature of Greymatter, but I am not sure about aspcomments. Anyone who knows, I would love it if you'd post it to, ironically, the comments, and I will check when I get home from both the gym and when I get home later. Thanks.

I think I am really too far behind the times. Joanie Laurer got fired from the WWF back in May. I knew she was away, and her women's title was recently awarded after the Alliance line was done with, but I never thought she had been let go. At worst I thought she was on vacation. In case you didn't know, Joanie is better known as Chyna. even though she can't use the name cause Vince owns it. By the few articles I read online she is very happy to be known by her real name, not her ring name.

I also would like to point out I found out her real name by seeing Playboy in a store in Portage Place, but I wasn't looking for it, I just happened to be near it when looking at the Wired issue I was thinking about picking up. The Wired issue is too thin and has too few interesting articles for me, and the Playboy caught my eye cause it was her face but not the name I knew her by. Good luck, and take care. Oh, folks, she's also a blond. she looks good blond, I might add.

My mother asked me to upgrade her PC to Windows 2000 Professional since it was so easy for me to do it on my P.O.S. 233 MHz, and she thinks it will run so much better on her 500 MHz Celeron. I guess she doesn't realize her CPU is about as good as mine, but that is a matter of semantics. Mom, if you are reading this, I need a list of programs you want to keep, or you want reinstalled, and their websites, if possible, from the about option in most help menus.

I need this list so I can look into how to archive any and all data from these programs, and so I can get access to a version to install after Windows 2000 is on there. I am told it is much better to install over, instead of upgrade from. If you want me to give you Windows 2000, I need this list. Thanks. To my readers, does anyone know of any conflicts with the Celeron 500 MHz and the Windows 2000 Professional Operating System? I want to make sure I have all bases covered as this will be a lengthy exercise anyway, and I don;t want it to be any longer then necessary.

I stopped by McNally Robinson on the way back from my parents place this morning, and after that I went to Book Fair and Coles in Eaton;s Place, and I noticed one recurring theme in the responses I got to my main question. "No, there will be no copies of Tolkien books until such time as the publisher prints more, and no we don't know when this will be" The funniest thing is the guy at McNally Robinson said his contact with the publisher says they are shocked at the demand. Umm excuse me? Did you miss the massive amounts of fan sites for the movie that have been around as the internet?

How about the continual sales and assignments of The Hobbit and other Tolkien novels as major parts of English classes from grades 6 to 12? Everyone since the books were first released who went through grades 4-10 have had to read these books, and you didn't think people would be swarming the book stores for copies of his books? If I had been in charge of your company, or the printing department, I would have begun printing off copies full time the day after people started seeing movies to catch the trailer, and then leaving them.

Oh, my mother also said my sister told her to uprgrade to the newest MSN Messenger. I told her no. I will not upgrade her to that greedy program. If my sister wnats her upgraded, she'll have to do so herself.

There were two stories I noticed in the papers today. The first was in the Free Press abut why hackers are now interested in home computers, which I would have thought were obvious. High speed internet combined with GHz+ CPU powers. The second was the cover story of both the Free Press and The Sun really, which essentially said that people are choosing smokers over kids. The Sun's said 'A Ban on Kids' and the Press said 'Smokers in, Children out'. It is amazing to see the press pandering to Glen Murray and not giving a shit about the financial troubles that will be experienced by those businesses that do not take these measures. Will Glen Murray and the city subsidize these businesses so they d not need to do this? I doubt it.

Oh, hey, I forgot to show you all the cool 365 day image generated by the stats server Trinic runs. It shows when I began with them, and when I was offline. It also showed when this became a hit, or had it's 15 minutes of fame if you prefer to call it that. On the topic of site stuff, I am getting rid of the forums. I wil defer to some of the other great forums out there, like Leoville. It might be back, but for now, consider those to all be dead links.

Last week there was the Universal Plug and Pray..err I mean Play vulnerability, and this week we have a file from Steve Gibson which helps you turn off the buggy and vulnerable feature of Windows. UnPlug 'n Pray program is a really small executable(22K) that, once run, will tell you one of three things. It will tell you you do not have installed if it 's present, it will tell you it's disabled if it is installed, or it will tell you it is running if you have previously used the program to start it. I have a copy available from my server, or you can get it from the UnP'nP site. This is only to turn of a vulnerable service, you should still patch your system for the announced bug, based on recommendations by the FBI.

Joy. I think I am being DoS'd. I am having a huge amount of packet incoming, and I cannot get anything out. Therefor I will be shocked if this post makes it out. I have had a massive amount of packets from three different hosts, to the point of several hundred a minute before. My log file for ZA has grown to 5 MB in less then a day. I will be severely pissed if I am right, as these people are not generally know for being quitters. The only other option is that my internet connection has turned to shit in an instant. I rebooted and it is bad after not even a minute online. The problem is that my modem does not show any problems. It shows it is powered on, sending and receiving. The fifth light is occasionally blinking, but nothing spectacular. I dunno, all I can say is annoyed is an understatement since I am trying to get MT working on Trinic's server, and that kinda requires a working internet connection. In case this does not make it out, I will be saving it, and will post it when it comes back up. Oh, yeah,, and my computer has rebooted itself a huge number of times in the last two days.

Holy fuck(pardon the language and sacrilege) this is getting weird. I can post to Blogger, but my mail and news are down, as is seemingly every other site. God, I hate the internet and my dependence on it sometimes. Here is a list of sites with successful pings, followed by the list of unsuccessful:

• blogger.com
• www.geeksworld.net

• trinic.com
• msn.com
• ftp.geeksworld.net
• mail.geeksworld.net
• google.com
• yahoo.com
• weblogs.com
• shaw.ca
• userland.com
• There are more, just no more needing mention

The worse thing about this forced hiatus? I cannot even find out if it is just me cause email is dead, and I have no one on IM to ask. This is a major annoyance. Is it maybe a DNS server? Is this some Karmic way for TPTB to tell me I should have studied harder to decipher the issue? I could sooo see that. Oh well, at least I have my TV and MP3's. On that note, I have some more site stuff to do. I may toss up a hack, but don;t count on it.

Cool. Ev has a spell check solution that is awesome in all respects. It will spell check any text. All you need to be running is Windows with IE 5.x or better, and have Word installed. I have all three and have been running the code for my posts through a blank mail message. I will have to see how convenient this is before I actually post a URL to it, but check out blogger.com for more. Oh, and it looks like I am back, after a freeze up. Yes, now to finish up the hack and post it, then to bed with me. It's gaining on 8 AM ya know. Night.

Hack is done. Night.

Let me try this again:

Loading initial data into system...

An error occurred while loading data:

Unsupported driver MT::ObjectDriver::DBM: Can't locate DB_File.pm in @INC (@INC contains: d:\web\users\geeksworldnet\mt\extlib d:\web\users\geeksworldnet\mt\lib C:/Perl/lib C:/Perl/site/lib .) at d:\web\users\geeksworldnet\mt\lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 9.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at d:\web\users\geeksworldnet\mt\lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 9.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 1) line 1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 1.

That, for those who may not understand it, is the error I am getting from Moveable Type when I try to install it and run the mt-load.cgi file. I have been trying for days to get it running, and nothing I seem to do works. Anyone out there with ideas as to the problem, please email me. To give background, the box is NT, I have no hands on access, nor shell access. I have no ability to install anything, nor will the webmaster of the server. Yeah, this likely means I am SOL, but it is needed either way. I want to be able to try it out for a bit before I move to Shawn's server.

Well, the more I look into this, the more I get the feeling that getting MT running on Trinic's servers will require a cooperative admin, and I am already used to the fact that I will not get one from Trinic. All I get from them is talking down, treated as a moron and my choices questioned. I know they do not support foreign scripts, but they can at least not hinder the use of outside scripts, and that seems to be their plan. A person cannot complain about something that is clearly outlined, and they take advantage of that to the nth degree. Oh well, they will learn the risks of doing this to their customers soon enough.

According to the documentation I need to have access to a command line on the server to install the three needed modules, assuming they are running ActivePerl, the, to my knowledge, only perl on Win32 software package. The packages I need are HTML::Template (version >= 2), Image::Size, and DB_File. The documentation clearly states that installing these on a Win32 machine requires access to the command line to access the P PM program. I guess some might be thinking I haven’t even asked Trinic for help on this, which is true, but they have made it clear that they have no interest in actually helping me. Their line of thought on this really seems to be that they provide very basic web hosting, and if you want anything else, well, fuck off. I mean that might require that they actually, you know, work..

Ohhh, I hurt. I hurt badly, but it is a good hurt. I am laughing so hard I am in pain. I jsut read this on Brian's site.
I just found out that the brain is like a computer.
If that's true, then there really aren't any stupid people.
Just people running Windows
Ohhh, it is even funnier the more oftne you read it. <vbg>

Oh my, not more. "But my point is that because of computer weirdness, I regularly see an entire morning's work -- sometimes as many as 18 words -- get blipped away forever to the Planet of Lost Data. Needless to say, I use Microsoft Windows. I've been a loyal Windows man since the first version, which required you to write on the screen with crayons. Every year or so, Microsoft comes out with a new version, which Microsoft always swears is better and more reliable, and I always buy it. I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont" That from this article by Dave Barry. My only comments are that I thought the house had been redesigned to more resemble Texas..

What a shock. It takes certain people, or certain DNA strands I guess, to be able to decide instantly that you should hack such a simple kids game, even at 5 years old. Cody never does, he is a stickler to the rules. I am somewhat the same, but I do like to customize stuff too. The Hacking Penguin Pile-Up is a very... interesting, and quirky idea, and I have to admit I cam up with captions for almost all of the images. A great Linux gift, though likely not designed with Tux fans, nor hacking in mind. Doc also has a great article on Lindows and why MS sued.

Is anyone else oddly excited about what is going to happen during the two major speeches this week? Bill is going to release a new component to their goal of a home network in the most broad based and expansive meaning. Then there is Steve, and he is going to release, well, something. We aren't sure rumors abound, but no one quite knows. I have heard several possibilities, but nothing definitive. iWalk? iDock? iIntel? Those are three of the most mentioned of the 50 or so ideas, all the way from a new WiFi standard that is cross platform stable, to an iMicrowave/iFridge combo that orders your milk when you have a cup or less left and works well with Bill's home. I am not an Apple fan, but I think I might try to catch Steve and Bill's keynotes at their respective events in Vegas and San Francisco.

What is Daynotes.org? Well, in simple terms, they are an excellent group of people with a wide variety of inrterests and professions. The group is based in Jerry Pournelle's journal, which has dominoed to a great extent. There are two different sites, due to a split in the group a short while ago, but for the most part it is all the same thing. Check out the .com site for one group, and the .org for the other. You'll notice the only differences are design and a few different names. I respect all of the members of the groups, and read many of them myself. Oh, yeah, and my brother is one too. The .com has a greater explanation of the origins of the Daynotes Gang. Hope this helps explain them.

Congrats to Keith on the Straight A's. Now, if I can go for straight D's that will be a bonus. *sigh*. Oops, I already got a C(I think 73% is a C), so it will be straight D's except for one C.

Does anyone know a complete list of tags that you can use with CSS? I have seen a few, and use some of those here, but I have no idea of them all. The reaosn I ask is I just found a new one from Chris's Blog, overline. I have used underline on hover for a link a few times, but I don't know what else I can do without a listing of the possible code to be used. Thanks.

Hmm. Two nights in a row. I am going for this year's record. In other words, the hack is done, posted and I am off to bed when my Seti unit is done. See you all tomorrow, hopefully.

Bloody hell! I hate not being able to sleep. I guess I will blog and design until I get tired, as there is fuck all else to do for at least 2 hours when the Y opens up, if I want to go that is. I guess the first mentionable is that Dave has concluded the voting on his awards, and named the first winner, this one being the Best Technology Blog. The winner is Hack The Planet, though not one I read. I voted for Living Without Microsoft. Dave is announcing one winner per day between now and Friday, with Friday's being the Blog of the Year. While on the topic of awards, I have decided I will go ahead with mine, but only out of spite for the complete lack of nominations, and will assume my choices were the best for the categories. Please look at my previous post for a description of Daynotes.

Ok, I need to know something. For those of you who do read the hacks and this blog, I want to know if you all think I should keep the layouts the same? Should I convert the blog to the same format as the new site will look like? It wouldn't be hard, I don't think, to convert the Blog to the new format since I am already working in that template, just hard code the site links. I was thinking that instead of the poll on the side I could have a blog roll, since that seems all the rage. I think the links I currently have are a little, well, tired. The donation places may not even be accepting any more, and the others have enough publicity as is. The news sites, well, half of those I don't even look at, to be absolutely and brutally honest. So, email me or comment on this post and let me know. For a refresher as to what the new site will look like, check out today's hack.

Since I have little else to blog this early in the AM, shall we do some search answers? Let's do it. These will be from this day's so far, and from yesterday's if today doesn't provide enough. On an aside, I wonder what the site logs for this site will look like 2 or 3 weeks after the blog moves to it's own URL. I can only assume it will literally die, based upon what I am seeing. Let's get started... after a short message from my boot loader.

Ok, I swear I looked on your site, Keith. I guess I just plain missed it. The funny thing is I think I have seen this page before(did you respond to my previous question?). I chalk it up to a really weird Christmas holidays, and not firing on all cylinders. Thanks for the links to the CSS stuff, and I will be sure to check that stuff out. In Linux I personally prefer Pico for my text editing, though many will likely redicule me for it.

Ok, well, the search terms went down the drain as I took it upon myself to combine the last month and a bit worth of log files into a more reasonable two files, and now I am going to try again to get to bed. Either way I am going to bed early tomorrow, so don't expect much here.

Hey. Back from my parents. I am wondering, does anyone know what's going on with Scoble and the URL shuffle? I now have three URL's for what looks like the same thing, and then thereis his Windows XP news URL. The ones I know of are one, two, three, and the XP News. What I am wondering, is which one(s) Scoble wants to use for his official URL? Anyone know? I want to blog roll him, but I have no idea where to start. Oh, and can someone inform Leo LaPorte that he should make a mention of his new location in his old blog.

I will be going to bed around 1:30 or 2, so if there is nothing else here, we go back to our regularily schedued school posting. I am not sure if this will mean more or less posting, but it will be different for sure. See you all, sooner or later, but eventually.

Add one more to that list of Scoble blog's. The Radio 7.1 Blog is another one, once again with the same format and layout. Does this guy know how to stop?

Now that I have more info on Steve Jobs' Keynote tomorrow, I will be sure to be up by noon to catch the speech, being broadcast and webcast live. It will be big, as I cannot recall such extensive live coverage in a long time, not to forget the major advance info on it. TSS on Friday was pumping the details about their live broadcast, and the webcast site has been hyping it for awhile. I guess tomorrow morning may be big, I guess.[Update:Doc says that he will try to blog it too. Awesome.]

So, how do you know you have a loyal and helpful reader? When he emails you just befoe 1 AM, when no one in their right mind is up, and tells you something on your site is busted, so he couldn't help you with another problem, that's when.

From: Keith Devens 
Subject: RE: OE to Outlook
To: Geek 

Hey, just wanted to let you know your ASP Comments code is broken. I'm

getting the following error:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Operation must use an updateable

query.

/aspcomm/aspcomments.asp, line 122

I know exactly why this is happening too...

Haha, from his site... "This was written purely as an exercise to teach

myself ASP one evening (which turned into a long night and part of the next

day)."

He didn't learn ADO well enough though. Maybe you're not using the newest

version (1.1.2)?

Anyway, just wanted to let you know about it. I was going to pass this along

about cascading style sheets, but ran into that error:

http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/?id1186

Hope that helps.

Keith

Thanks a lot. The code is now fixed, in that permissions were the problem. I will read the link in the morning, or I should say when I get up for the day. Take care.

Gladiator, which I am about half way through watching, is a very good movie. Russell Crowe, who has shown himself to be one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood, is excellent yet again. The only question I have is when someone is going to let him talk with his Australian accent? He was allowed to show his accent a bit in Proof of Life, but for the most part he has had to show his excellent skills of talking like an American.

The updates section of Steve's speech was good, with a lot of great news for Apple, but nothing unexpected. One thing I am happy to see is that he admitted that Unix programmers can easily move between the Mac and their own Unix machine. The one thing is that the crown, large as it is, must be itching to see the new iMac.

Interesting to see that so far Doc is not blogging the event. I am guessing that either he has not been able to find an 802.11b connection, or he has not yet posted due to lack of mentionable content. I guess it is nothing major so far, in that they are only doing new products from companies like MS and Adobe, who has the stage right now, showing off their Photoshop and other products for OS X.

My god! Spell checking in Photoshop? That is an odd feature for a graphics program, though I admit it has been long needed. For far too long text in an image has been treated as a click off and it is set. We want to be able to edit it and move it later.

Please know, as I am trying to blog this as close to live as I can, I will correct spelling later. Hope it isn't too annoying.[Update: Spelling checked and corrected]

Now onto Games, where they are showing off a really cool Harry Potter game. I think it would make more sense if I had seen the movie, and yes, that is one of the two major ones I haven't seen yet, but it looks very cool. They also have a version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and The Sims for OS X. Is there any OS that cannot play a good game? Linux can do games good these days, and even Windows 2000 can, so that is two of the most non gamer OSes around. Maybe there is more use for a Mac then a fish tank. Maybe I said, nothing definite.

Ok, why have iMac's new to customers not shipped with OSX as the boot OS? I think that has to be one of the main reasons people have not upgraded. You buy a computer, you expect the latest and greatest. At least that is the general idea, isn't it?

Lucas Films did a great presentation, including a taped message from George himself, and they showed hwo strong Mac is used in pre production of movies, like Episode 2. This is not surprising, as I have seen several of these things, all in quicktime.

I find it funny that Steve just spoke of people authoring content for the world, but everyone consumes it. Well, Blogs are content, authored by the ordinary people, and you have completely ignored the bloggers of the world, at MacWorld, and in OS X. Where is the native Mac OS X blog software? Unless it comes from someone like Dave, it isn't coming as Apple has shown time and again they don't give a shit about the Blogging world.

Ok, iPhoto looks good, I will admit, but one of my questions is how well does it work with the Web? Yeah, you can eliminate the so called chain of pain, but I don't print pictures, I edit and then save in jpeg or gif for upload and display on a web page. So, as I was saying, how good is it at optimized for the web imaging? I think Steve should not have had a picture from the audience, as it looked like his kid since it took some convincing, and the little point of stating there were millions on the web was unnecessary. I do like the scrolling of thumbnail setting. I like the ability to change the view size so easily, but what kind of system is he sign on the stage? Is the likely top of the line machine he is using making it easier to do all this great stuff? I think that is likely.

Ok, is Steve trying to look stupid or is it just a by-product of the live webcast? I have seen at least a dozen times when Jobs looked completely unprepared and out of place. The most recent is when he said he would make iPhoto toss an image he selects into Photoshop, only to realize he does not have it installed yet. I also don't need to see his bald noggin moving from side to side during an audio added slide show. It just really is not needed, honestly. Ok, free hosting of your site by apple is a good touch, but how editable is it? Will your page look like a million others?

You can also order Kodak prints of your pictures through Apple. I am not sure how many people will want to order a 4 foot by 6 foot copy of an image, but you never know. I would be very interested in seeing how much the costs are compared to getting them developed at WalMart. I would be willing to bet they are at least double the cost.

They also have a book design feature to facilitate the easy ordering of a bound book of your photo's. I am really getting the feeling they are giving away the OS to facilitate killing you on the services associated with their products. The first was bragging how many DVD R's they have sold because of their iDVD software and the ability to burn movies onto them, and now the too frequent order online offers, they just seem to be too much. Nice to see the TechTV talking heads might just agree with me

Does anyone know when the Gates speech at CES is? Will it be webcast? Broadcast?

I am not sure what this must look like to those there in person, who will likely be caught up in the charisma of the event and speech, but I just thnk this speech feels like it is all about the extra's. Nickel and diming the user to death. This shouldn't be popular with their customers, but it is Apple, and they will not change the way customers they will see them. I see them as a monopolitic company in it's own right, who keeps users so close to the vest that they have no other choice for the majority of common uses of the Mac.

I think TechTV interrupting the speech for commercials may cause me to run behind, as Tracy will be here in a bit for the Keyboard connector. I was figuring she;d be here around 1, which is when the actual speech should be over, but right now Steve, on my screen, is only at the iBook, and he still has to unveil the new iMac as well as round up where Apple has gone over the last year with the iBook and iMac. Really nice looking 14 inch iBook. Decent specs on it with 256 MB RAM, 20GB HD, Combo drive, 14 inch monitor and no thicker then the 12 inch screen version.

Ohh, now we move to the iMac. What's up with him showing commercials past, present and future?

$1,299, $1,599, and $1,799. The more expensive will ship in March, with the lesser expensive versions shipping one per month after that(1799 - Jan, 1599 - Feb, 1299 - Mar). I think, personally, that it looks like a lamp, but it has a lot of cool features. This thing is not only a flat panel, but has a lot of cool features too. I would say more, but I have to get ready for Tracy to get here, as I am going to have to beg and plead for a ride to school. I will be sure to post more tonight from school. Bye.

Well, she did not show up for a very long time after, shortly after 2, but she was kind(lol) enough to give me a ride to school. I am going to spell check all of my posts form earlier, and try to study a bit more, so we will see where things stand when I am able to post, sometime around supper break. Talk to you soon.

Well, spell check is done. Took me a bit, and I am a lot more frustrated because of it, but it is done. Some posts needed only a word or two, but some needed a lot of changes. I guess typing on the fly is not my style indeed.

You know how I was bitching awhile back about how he wanted to do too much in too little time? He's at it again. He wants to do the remaining 7 chapters in 3 weeks. After that he wants to do Netware 5.1/6.0, Linux(only 40 or so hours), MS Exchange 5.5 and Network Infrastructure in the time between now and March 21, when we have our Final Exam, immediately followed by work practicum. Joy. 'Work it' is my new slogan. As in work my ass off to get a passing grade. No mention of what is up with the Pro final retest, which we still do not have back, but I think we will be having one on one meetings soon, so I expect him to spring it on me then.

You know what, between troubles with Blogger connecting to the web server, and troubles with Blogger publishing, never mind the continual redirections to sorry.blogger.com, I am shocked I have had any luck posting at all. Last night when I tried top post I got a redirection to sorry.blogger.com, and today I am getting a message saying that publishing is unavailable. I guess it doesn't really matter as all I am doing is gathering info to discuss with Shawn for when he begins hosting the sites.

For now I think between two hosting packages, I can work it all out. One will be the geeksworld one, which will have 2 or 3 mail lists and only one email address. That one would also have an extra 20 MB beyond the original one. The mail lists would be GeekLine, TuxTalk and one that does Microsoft, though the name will be different. I will be sure to keep the current emails in hard copy, but if you are already a subscriber, I would recommend you keep in touch with the blog and I will pass along the info when we move.

The second would be for hosting this site, geekblog.net. This would not require nearly as much as the geeksworld.net, in all respects. I would only need about 20 or 30 MB, and one email. I would not need a mail list, and I think the other 20 MB and 1 mail list could be allocated to geeksworld.net, to keep my costs down. I know Shawn needs as much money as he can get, but I also have dire financial needs as well. I guess we will need to talk this over. Hopefully my explaining to him that I will be willing to pay more, even perhaps going with a full price co location, after I am done school. Hopefully this is enough to persuade him.

This is the most recent seen post, from my computer, of Keith's blog: "This is really weird. Optimum Online must use separate DNS servers, because sometimes I get my new site and sometimes I get my old site when I type in "keithdevens.com". Maybe each of their DNS servers updates on opposite days and one hasn't updated yet? You can tell if it's the new site if there have been weblog entries since I said I was moving my database. Also, my new site has this button down in the right hand corner instead of the Cedant one.

It doesn't seem to be just me either, because, for instance, yesterday when I posted to my weblog, weblogs.com was able to read my new site and noticed a change, but today, when I just posted this entry, it read my old one. I've posted this same message on both servers so the zero people who read my site will know what's going on :)"

I now know what I can expect come this month when I move my sites. Joy.

Moveable Type 1.4 has been released. I have not heard what all has changed in this version, but it sure looks to be better based upon the upgraded blogs I have had the pleasure of seeing. I think that even if this is a bug fix, it is important to have them released as quick as possible since so many blog owners use this software.

One thing that has really gotten to me in regards to class time, after we discussed where things are going and were we stand, is how little we have discussed the very important topic of security. Yeah, we are told about permissions and the only mention of security is 'the wrong permissions can cause your system to be hacked' and all we hear about other security issues is that they exist, but very little on how to protect against them. This seems to me to be from the perspective that the curriculum is Microsoft approved, and the material we will be working on now is actually stamped with Microsoft Official Curriculum. I guess Microsoft is going to sad extremes to avoid mentioning it's massive security breaches and critical bugs that are discovered en masse.

Looking at the MT 1.4 release, I might try to get it working on Trinic's server, cause I have a lot of annoyances with what I run now. The previous ranted upon Blogger problems is one of them, along with the problems with the aspcomments system, some of the problems with it being the continued shitty log file entry for every post on a page. If I went to the page for the week of the 11th, it would enter over 50 lines in my log file. 50! In the time of my log files being in the multiple megs, I wonder what percentage of those are asp comments, as I already know a majority of the entries in the log file are from the blog alone. I wonder how bad it will look when I move the blog to the blog domain. I will let you all know either tonight or tomorrow, when either a)blogger begins publishing again, or b)I actually do it. Which ever happens last. For the moment, I am off to the MUUG meeting, now that my 3rd Seti unit is done. I hate to say this, but the install of Windows 2000 has made this machine 10 times better then it was.

By the way, in case you are wondering, the reason I didn't post anything from last night until tonight around 3. it is because I was asleep, then at student aid. Asleep for 12 hours. I was still tired when I woke up. I was just as shocked. I plan to be in bed early tonight, around 1 or 2, dependant on Buffy rerun, and be up around 11 to go to Student Aid again, hopefully with more definitive results.

Today the world mourns the loss of a great man. Dave Thomas, owner and figurehead of the Wendy's restaurant chain, died at the age of 69. Thomas died around midnight at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the company said Today. I must say I will miss the ads with Dave, he always found a way to make the idea of watching a commercial a little more interesting.

Well, the Hack is up, in the newly trialed CuteFTP(I got sick of the SSH FTP program) and I must say that MT is still not running. I was really hoping that 1.4 would change stuff but it didn't. I guess I will have to wait for Shawn to check the software out, and see what he thinks. I really have to hope he is willing to install it, as there is no other software I trust enough with my data to use, and he has made good points about security with Boggier. Oh well, I was hoping to be in bed a long time ago, and did actually try, but I am too untired to do so. I will try to go to bed now, but I get the feeling I will once again be doing the all nighter thing with a very early visit to the Y. See you all later.

One thing I wanted to note, please give your continued support to Scoble as he goes through some rough, but apparently better times. I had no idea he was going through a divorce, as he has never mentioned it, but I do wish him luck and the best wishes I can provide. Scoble: You have today given me a lot of encouragement, believe it or not, and renewed hope I can do this school thing. Your words, 'Take it from me: things do improve eventually. Don't give up. Make a plan and stick to it. Ask yourself: "if I knew I was going to die in a month, what would I do differently?"' Well, all I can say to answer that is work my ass off to make a better life for myself and make my mark in this world. Thanks for giving me the inspiration to do both.

Can I be jealous yet? Please? Ok, well then can I move to Maine and go back to Grade 7? I think I really need a few credits from that grade. Really, I do. No joke. Well, the reason I want to go to Maine and be in Grade 7(or 8 for that matter, I just did poorly in Grade 7), is because all Grade 7 and 8 students, and their teachers, are being given wireless Apple iBooks by the state of Maine. The world is so unfair. I, a student in a high end course like Networking, cannot get a computer to run Windows 98 decently, and a bunch of kiddies in the US are getting Laptops. God I wanna be a kid again *sniff, sniff* What says those things become hacking tools within days?

Damn it all. Now when I went down this lady was out sick for the day. Yesterday she was in a meeting to decide some applications, but no word on whether or not mine was included. So, I will go back again tomrrow to see where things stand. I am getting more then annoyed, and want this resolved, as does my mother and Justin, and rightly so.

This is the email I just got from Trinic. to say I am dissappointed, well, is an understatement. I was hoping that OpenSRS taking them to task would resolve the issue, but it has done nothing of the sort. Oh well, I guess I live with Trinic. Check out the email below.

Dwight Wallbridge,

We have been contacted by our domain name supplier, OpenSRS. A request had been made by you directly to OpenSRS for the OpenSRS username and password for your domain name. Unfortunately, as we have stated in previous communications, it is our policy not to provide our customers with the OpenSRS username and password for domain names. However, this does not hinder your ability to take full advantage of your domain name in any way.

Our Internet Manager located at http://manager.trinic.com/ has the identical function as the manage interface at OpenSRS. We have custom built the Internet Manager based on the OpenSRS manage interface to better suit our customers' needs. It is an exact mirror of the OpenSRS system meaning the Internet Manager allows you to perform any task the OpenSRS management interface supports.

To manage your domain name, we invite you to logon to the Internet Manager by visiting http://manager.trinic.com/. In case you have misplaced your Trinic account information, it has been provided for you once again below.

Username:
Password:

After entering your account information, click 'Logon'. You will then be taken to a list of all your domain names you have with Trinic, and the active services for each domain name. To manage 'geeksworld.net', simply click on the 'Edit Domain Name' link for 'geeksworld.net'. From the following page, you have access to manage every aspect of your domain name including modifying contact information, and changing the DNS entries.

If you have any further inquiries regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact us by replying to this e-mail. Thank you for choosing trinic.

Sincerely,

Technical Support                 5816 113B Street
Trinic                            Edmonton, Alberta
                                                  T6H 3L3

support@trinic.com                        Phone: (780) 438-4637
http://www.trinic.com/                    Fax: (780) 989-0902

Wow. I am shocked. I can very much not believe that Microsoft would stoop to ballot stuffing to make themselves look better. The story this time is that MS heard about a reader poll being performed by ZDNet UK, in which he preliminary results showed very few of the respondents were planning on programming for .NET.

Apparently shortly after the preliminary results were released, a mass amounts of visits form the Microsoft domains appeared in their logs, along with several obvious script based entries. One person even tried 228 times to enter. Not happy to pay for a positive published report from one of the better firms, they now stuff the ballot box to get their popularity, false as it is, to be noticed. Sickening.

Dan Gillmor says he needs an ISP who supports SSH, and a client for the Mac OS X to do the same. I could help if all he wanted was a web host with SSH, as that is all Synack allows, but as for an ISP, though I know not why you'd need an SSH supporting ISP other then for uploading and file management in regards to web space, or a client for the mac, I am lost. Sorry. Oh, wait, the guy who did the presentation last night said that Mac OS X has the commercial version of SSH 2.0 built in.

God, this is annoying. Since the other day I was completely unable to print, and today I wasn't even able to connect to the net at all, I decided to reinstall and have just finished. The funniest thing is when I reinstalled Seti it continued my last work unit, the one from before Christmas that is. I thought I had lost that one entirely. I am now able to print again, and surf the web, but things are still not 100%. I have only 7 days left in my O'Reilly trial, and then I am done, so I have to at least finish printing the Web Design in a nutshell book by the end of the week. As well, I cannot seem to connect to Messenger today. Joy.

Ohhh, this is too funny. Brian has a most hilarious joke on his stie today, and the worst thing is Suzuki is right in all of them. God, I was laughing so hard I was in tears!

Google does it again! The search engine which continually renews the way it works and revolutionizes the way people search on the internet on a monthly if not weekly basis, has made checking the latest news an amazing new thing. Google News Headlines is a new service in which Google, who was just named the Scripting News 2001 Best Weblog Utility/Distraction, searches the news sites for new stories and combines all of them into their ranking. I am not sure how the ranking service works, but the world's favourite search site has once again outdone itself.

By the way, the open letter to Garth Brooks in regards to the insult that I, as one of his biggest fans, take from him calling all those who listen to his songs in MP3 form, occasionally downloaded from a file sharing service, a bunch of pirates who don't care about the artist. That one, it's still coming, but I am a little preoccupied with the beta and getting it ready by the end of the month. I have so little done, and so much to do.

I am also working on shutting down the mailing lists except for the three that will be brought back up when I get mail lists running on Synack. speaking of mail lists, I found this one when looking up Wallbridge in Google, only to find not a mention of my site(s) in 5 pages. My brother is a member, and I thought I would see what it's like on this list. It looks to be a very busy list, and one I can really

Hey. Sorry so quiet today, but I was too busy reading and listening to Tago lecture. I get home to Dave having rather gloriously released Radio 8.0, and I was going to go get it, but there is a problem. Here's the requirements:

Microsoft Windows

Windows XP, 2000, NT, ME or 98.
Pentium 450 MHz.
128MB RAM.
13MB Disk.
Internet connection, Web browser

You see the problem? Yeah. I see a couple. Pentium 450 MHz. 128 MB RAM. On both I am more then half the required here. I think I could still run it, but I don't see much of a need. I might install it just to see what it looks like, but it will be a short time install as I am more then happy with 7.1, since all I really do with it is check for new posts to RSS enabled sites. Dave, Scoble, and John Robb all have said great things about it, and personally most of it seems to be major hype and marketing, but for my needs, it is pretty useless. I don't blog with it, in fact every time I try to blog with 7.1 I get errors and can no longer read sites, thereby making it even more useless. Therefore, I will stay happy with 7.1, and will continue using it. My only question is whether Dave's work with Microsoft made him so much like them that he will no longer support 7.1 now that he is making money off of 8.0?

I now have a renewed faith in the American legal process, as a judge has apparently tossed out the educational settlement that Microsoft was banking on to settle a variety of suits brought for Anti Trust violations by over 100 plaintiffs. Many have gone against this agreement saying, like Apple's Steve Jobs' that the deal would only give Microsoft more dominance in a market that they have so far been left out of almost entirely, education. More on this when I find more info on it.

Well, I have found a couple articles, one on The Register and another on Wired, as well as this one from Dan Gillmor, which both essentially say the same thing. The best summation is this:

"WASHINGTON -- A federal judge Friday rejected Microsoft's offer to donate computers and software to schools to settle a class action lawsuit accusing it of overcharging for its products. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz said the settlement is "critically underfunded" and would have anticompetitive effects on the market, especially on Microsoft (MSFT) rival Apple Computer. Microsoft had offered to give software, 200,000 refurbished computers and other resources the company valued at $1 billion to the nation's poorest public schools. "

That from the Wired article. All in all, I can say this seems to show the judicial authorities in the US might yet have hope of being right, just and fair.

Paul Coe Clark III, of The Net Economy, sat down with Michael Tiemann, the red Fedora donned owner and CEO of Red Hat, the Linux distributor, and the answers are very interesting. Topics included Sklyarov, DMCA and SSSCA. Check it out and tell me if there are any other pressing matters and high tech topics you'd like to ask the head of one of the best and biggest Linux makers.

Hi. Where have I been? I have been wasting my time on Ask It Here. Boy is this site fun. There are some stupid questions, a lot of silly ones, and some real gems. Across a site with almost 2000 members, I have not found a question that cannot be answered by these people. Awesoem place, and it is exciting to earn A-Bucks.

Ok, I am worried again. When I began the course I am now enrolled in, the first stories I heard were of tech troubles, and of the declining economy. Now I know the curse I am taking is not enough to be moving to the US, which has really pissed off quite a few people. The reason, apparently, is that you need a 2 year course to get a work visa for the US. Now I worry because John Dominik, a short trip from me, is expecting to be laid off. RBT is ranting against the troubles in the US economy, which do not doubt affects my countries economy more then we like to think, and against the injustice that John is going through, again to make things worse.

I wonder if I will have a job waiting for me when I get out of this course, assuming I make it, that is anything more then a help desk position. This makes me worry a great deal, my friend, for that is the key to the continual life of this site. One way or another, I need to support myself, but computers is my one true skill. Not a good sign at all. I guess I should get my nose in a book 24/7 for the next 4 months, so I have some sort of a chance to succeed in this course, and get a job, even if it is only at GWL or another company needing yet another tech support agent.

After long consideration, I am going to be going to school early on Monday, as I figure I should get my money the same time everyone else in my class does. As far as I can tell, everyone in my class gets their student aid funds on the 14th, and by rights I should have access to $200 on Monday anyway, but if every other class mate is getting their Manitoba loan on the 14th, well, then, so should I god damn it. If I do not write anything, or much of anything, on Monday, then you know I am out paying bills and stuff. Also, I doubt there will be much here tomorrow, as I will be up around 10, to figure out when Justin and I will be getting together to do some tutoring, and then coming home to study and do site work interchangeably. In other words, if all goes as planned, I will see you all Tuesday sometime. Night.

Do you ever get the feeling you should check your facts before you go and make a statement? Well, Doh! is all I can say right now as I have just looked over the info on the student aid form, and I see now I made an unnecessary(is it ever necessary?) ass out of myself. See, the 24th is when the Metis thing is available, not the 14th. The 14th, Tomorrow, is when the full loan comes available. Now, if the extra stuff could be decided, it would make life so much easier, right? Right.

You may all notice now that the site loads a lot faster. You may also notice the comments is gone. This is no coincidence. I decided to try to eliminate some possibilities for lag time, by taking out pieces of code which could possibly cause problems, and the first one was the key. I took out the ASPComments code and the site loads faster. As well, since someone on AIH told me the main page was 4.5 MB(WTF??) I now show the site as being it's proper 45 KB. That tells me that a lot of output was going out and nothing to show for it. Yes, I will miss the comments feature, but it was not up to full function anyway, and it is just as easy for people to email me. Hope no one minds that their comments are gone, but the files are still there, so no big deal, ok? Good.

Dave has a great way to describe the now defunct MS education donation settlement. "The proposed settlement, which would've allowed MS to donate $1B worth of software and obsolete PCs to impoverished schools was along the lines of punishing a drug pusher by allowing him to give away crack." Agreed, but thankfully it is over.

Good to see Craig Burton back to blogging, after what sounds like a wild ride with Twelve Horses, and I wish him, and his former employer, the best of luck.

One more question for Dave, or anyone at Userland, when can we expect a Linux or Unix based version of Radio? I am not saying free, just one that will work just as well, natively, in a Unix environment as it seems to do in Windows.

Bob asks "I thought the Ximian ftp server was slow, but the Red Hat server makes the Ximian server look like the proverbial firehose. Are there mirrors of the Red Hat server? If so, I think I'll try one" The answer, in short, is yes. There is a list on the Red Hat site of the mirors, but I peronally use one in Alberta, which I have found to be amazingly fast, if I want to download Linux stuff. I haven't used it in awhile, so I cannot recall the exact name, sunset.ab.ca maybe? or sunset.ualberta.ca? I know sunset is in the name. I think. God, I have't FTP'd in ages! Except for site stuff that is.

I was wrong. It's sunsite.ualberta.ca. The mirror listing is here as well.

Ok, here's a good question, and interesting point, from someone on the geeks list. "How many machines do most people keep running in there house? I Think running three machines around the clock is bad." Most of the people on the list who have answered(I haven't as I feel it is best to just lurk for a bit and see what the list is like and protocols) say they have 4 or 5 running 24/7. Most of them have another 3 or 4 that are on when they are awake, though most Windows boxen are in power saving.

My view here from the perspective of running 2, but only because that is all I have, is that power these days is easy to conserve using power saving, and good power bars. So, I ask all the geeks out there, how many do you run? Of those how many are 24/7? How about only occasionally? What do you think is wasteful power use? what about responsible power use? I run a 486(Coyote) that rarely gets used, because it is not patched not net connected and badly configured. I also know it uses very little power, and is best left on.

I also run my 233 MHz, and it is on except for the occasional reboot. I know this is secure. When/if I get the funds I expect, I will be making this one(currently Merlin 2000) a Linux server/firewall/router and the new one the main workstation. I also plan to get the p75 working for a workstation for Cody(my nephew) when he is here. Yes, I have big plans, and yes, my geek is in full force, but hell, why else would I be a geek?[Also posted on AIH]

Well, I was not going to leave until the 9:13 bus to the school, but then I checked and if I don't get there until 9:45 I have to wait until 1 PM for the next bus from the school back downtown, which is badly timeds to say the least. Therefor, I am going to try to make the 8:13 bus and that will give me time to get back to the school for classes tonight. On that point, I am off, I will see you all later.

Hello. I am at school, currently trying to figure stuff out to get back Downtown before the 1 PM bus. The loan is available, which is a great stress relief, now all I have to worry about, financialy, is the money for tutor and computer. I will be sure to update you all today or tomorrow, as soon as I know something on that respect. I also have to figure out where the money has to go, and where I can afford to send it. I do know for sure that there is not enough money for all of my bills, but I am still unsure as to which, other then rent, get the priority.

The known locations of necessary payment are transportation, hydro, and internet/cable. I do need to get some stuff, like some CD R's and household stuff, though. There are other things, but Iam not going to mention that here. From my info it should take about 3 days to get the money in my account. That rocks. Cool, there is a 10:53 bus that gets me to Grant, where I can transfer to the 66 and go downtown. I'm off!

I'm a woman! I knew there was something wrong! "Galadriel is the majestic elf queen of Lothlórien The Queen of the elven realm of Lorien, and wife of Celeborn, called the Lady of Light, Galadriel is a wielder of great power and wisdom. Although of significant age, she appears as a beautiful young woman. Galadriel is considered one of the mightiest of the Eldar, and it because of her power alone that Lorien has remained a sanctuary against Sauron and his evil. She rules her kind with benevolence and grace. She aids the Fellowship with special gifts and sound counsel, products of her power and wisdom. Frodo freely offered her the One Ring, and she refused. Because of this and her long opposition to Sauron, the Valar permitted her to return to Valinor." Those are my results from this site whihc decides your character from LOTR.

Oh no. This is not good. Shawn thinks Synack may not be up until the 1st of February. As I wanted to get the geekblog.net domain up this week, and geeksworld.net up at month's end with the new beta site. The worst thing is I think I may have to pay one more month at Trinic, which I was really hoping not to do. I guess I will have to pay that out of this, but I will email Shawn and see where things are at this point, and what he can tell me for certain. This is more then a tad disappointing, but I understand it from Shawn and his ISP(???)'s perspective. They want to save money, and he has no choice but to wait on them.

Hi. This will pry be one of the last things you'll hear from me for the next few weeks, unless something big happens. I will also be stopping by blog reading for the same length of time. I have a lot on my plate, as always, but these things are very important. The kinds of stuff I have to do are stuff like getting the Beta done, studying to pass the Server final on the 22nd(only one short week from now), and I have a few things I am doing to make the space used around here better. I am building some shelving units to put the 486(which is another project I want to be working on in the next few weeks) and Merlin 2000 on, and I want to organize some of the crap I have piling up around here.

I have completely taken apart the former Gator, even down to the processor, and have slightly organized all the tech in my boxes. I still have a lot to do, but I have begun in a big way. The worst thing is that my only tool for cutting wood is a serrated blade knife. Yeah, slow to say the least. I don't think my father has a saw anymore, and even if he did my mother would have a fit if she knew I was doing any sawing in my apartment. As long as I clean it up, as I need a vacuum anyway, all will be good.

I will try to keep you all up to date, especially if I get news on the potential computer and tutoring stuff, but for the most part this site will be quite silent. Sorry. I just have too many things to do, and not nearly enough time to do it in. Take care, and keep an eye out for the rare posts I do make, alright? Good.

Ok, I know I said I would be silent. I didn't lie. This is important. Lindows has learnt sharing. Just like a bad Windows configuration, the company founded by the founder of MP3.com has begun to share data with unintended parties. The company that was sued by Microsoft for having a name sounding too much like Windows, Microsoft's trademark Operating System. Because of that suit, Lindows has decided, without warning or consultation, to share all users email addresses and much of the content of emails from visitors with Microsoft, of course with the assurance that they will only be used in relation to the suit. This is an assurance coming from a company that people want to get away from because they do not trust. And you now want us to trust them? Hello????

Well, I tried to gain a Blogger Code, but it appears to be broken, likely out of over use. That reminds me, I think I need to do a new Geek Code, but is there an automated geek code generator liek there is for blogger code? I know there is a decoder for it. Google time! I was looking over my old one, and I found that too much has changed. Ahh, now it's fixed. Here's my Blogger code:

B2 d++ t k+ s u f+ i+ o+ x e+ l+ c

So, what's yours? I want to make a blog code page, including blog links. If I get a dozen people's blog codes, in my email box over the next few days, I will put it up. I will need your code, blog name, blog url, and your blogging name, if not the same as in your email. Thanks.

So, Billionaire Bill says his company will now focus more on privacy(LMFAO) and security "after a number of security problems with their products". A number? Might I remind them that the number is in the triple or quadruple digits? That is more then a small problem, and one that should have been solved a lot sooner. People say Microsoft should bundle an Anti Virus program in with their OS, now that they have wised up to provide something resembling(and named) a firewall, but my only question is whether anyone out there with a knowledge of MS products would even consider trusting an AV made or supported by MS? They can't get a mail client right, and their idea of a full featured firewall is one that only checks incoming packets. Come one! Get a brain Bill, you will need to go a lot farther to prove to the many doubters that you means it.

Well, a few things have become evident. The first is that I will be changing Coyote to Lucifer, when I plan to install Open BSD over the current install of Red Hat 6.2. I was pushed by a recommended reader to speak up on the geeks list, though I was planning on keeping quiet a little longer so Shawn wouldn't get mad at me, and I asked if anyone knew how to get the NIC's recognized on Coyote(the 486). I also asked what people thought would be best for a router/firewall/server on a 486, and most people said one or more BSD version.

Shawn offered, quite generously, to burn me a copy of Open BSD, though that will not work seeing as I have no CD ROM. He pointed out that it is possible to do a net install, so that is what I will do. I still need to format the hdb drive, as I don't seem to have the format command on the box. Once I read enough, which has been a major warning from Shawn, I will put the 800 MB as the master, and I will put the 500 MB as the slave for simple data and personal data storage, and to store files for site backup. I am told that both cards have good support in BSD, but PCI would be best.

The problem with that is that there are no PCI slots on the board. The next recommendation was to get two of the same, as it is much easier to configure two cards individually if they are the same brand. Therefore, now that my loan is in(yay!) I will be going and doing a little shopping for ISA NIC's. These, I am sure, will be very difficult to find, as ISA is seen by many as a dead format. I also want to pick up a second PCI one, though I am told Shaw will drop off as many as I need if only I call them. I wonder if they would have 2 ISA and 2 PCI if I asked. No harm in asking, right? Oh well, wish me luck!