A waste of bits and bandwidth

What a grey, dreary day… Of course I’m not sure what I expect; this is Vancouver and it is February. Unlike Biff, I prefer sun though I don’t mind the rain that much. As long as it’s warm…

I had an uneventful weekend which I won’t bore you with. *ponders* No, I won’t bore you with it. I know you’d rather be bored by my tech tales!

I re-installed SUSE today and it’s working fine. joat was correct in his comment that it should be ‘considered part of the learning process’. I learned a few new tricks during this install and the new FTP server was way faster to boot!

I stumbled across SoundChaos a couple of days ago and found that the author was linking to me. I sent her an email and she’s just starting up her new blog after three years at an old address. Check it out, she has a nice site.

Lastly, I added a few more pictures to the gallery this evening. Nothing from the party on Friday because the pictures mostly sucked but a few nice shots are up.

Going to dinner with Andrea Tuesday night, so that should provide plenty of fodder for the gallery. I’ve set aside $5 for beer to ensure that she’s drunk in the first ten minutes again. New layout for Andrea too which is looking pretty swanky…

After putting this off for a long time, I have finally put the pictures page together.

I looked at a lot of different solutions and was about to give up and do it manually (again) when I decided that I would try this out. I set it up last night and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to install and configure.

I have a couple of albums up though it’s more of an experiment right now. I’m not all that happy with the default layout but its all PHP so it’ll take me a little time to figure it out.

I’m also amazed that most of my pictures suck. Maybe it isn’t all that surprising given that I can’t frame a shot or hold the camera steady.

With that having been said, I’m off to the Shnewt’s this evening and will probably take a few shots that should be up soon. No really; like this weekend…

I guess it’s safe to say that this blog has made the big time; I got my first comment spam today! It was only there about an hour before I saw it and banned the IP (yes I know that doesn’t really help, but it felt good). It only took five weeks for that to happen.

Oh yeah, that Windows exploit that I wrote about? There are seven more that Microsoft hasn’t addressed yet. That gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling…

Not to be too smug, I pooched my Linux install last night, at least as far as using a GUI goes. Text only right now. I found the problem and went out and found how to fix it. Problem is, the configuration is corrupted beyond my ability to repair it. I know that there are smarter people than me who would snicker at the situation I find myself in.

I guess a re-install is in order as I just ain’t as smurt as some people. The question now, do I stick with Suse or return to Fedora? I really don’t care for the FTP install of Suse and Fedora gives you a multitude of options during the install.

Suse looks great but a window manger on Fedora would accomplish that too. This is why I have test machines, plus I love doing this sort of stuff which is why I’m not too broken up over having to do it again.

Now that I have bored you into a coma, I shall close…

… to a secure computing platform. Thanks Bill.

Time to visit Windows Update again. Stop reading this and go there now (why are you still reading?) as this, apparently, is the worst series of vulnerabilities ever seen on the Windows platform.

After you patch your machine, read more here. I already have plans to move my file server to Linux and I’m probably going to put Windows on my old box so I can play GTA until I buy an Xbox. It just doesn’t seem worth it any more.

The vulnerability was discovered by Marc Maiffret, ?Chief Hacking Officer? at eEye Digital Security. Marc alerted Microsoft 200 days ago and only now has a patch been made available. Microsoft claims that it needed more time for QA to test it. I’m not familiar with that phrase…

What people don’t comprehend is that all of our PC’s are ultimately connected to the same ‘network’ and while I might be safe after applying a patch I can still be affected by your refusal to apply the same patch. It’s like the guy that runs out of gas on a bridge; I may have gas but traffic is snarled so I’m not going anywhere. Same idea…

In other news that no one cares about, I got out and enjoyed the sun today. I walked around the seawall and snapped some pictures of the Lions Gate Bridge. I decided to cut through the park and managed to ‘get lost’. Now I wasn’t really lost but I was in an area I’d never been in before and while I knew I was going in the right direction, I wasn’t sure of where I was.

I gave thought to panicking or maybe lighting a really big fire but given that I was still on a path and that there were plenty of signs, I decided against it.

When I finally emerged I realized that I had done a lap of the park and was on the east side of the Causeway. I had intended to walk through the middle of the park. I guess my first clue should have been that I didn’t cross the Causeway on the way home. Disaster averted, I took some pictures at Coal Harbour and headed home.

It’s not easy being unemployed…

The new version of Firefox was released today. When I first dropped IE it was called Phoenix, then it was Firebird and now Firefox. Apparently there is an open source database called Firebird so they had to change the name. It looks good and appears stable. I know that none of you care. Sorry kids, no porn today…

I had a busy day today. I contacted Maria’s buddy and sent my resume to him. He seems very friendly and willing to help me so that’s great. Tech is full of great people… hopefully I get an interview out of all of this but we’ll see. Whatever happens, I’ll end up where I’m supposed to be.

I met up with Neil and Dan for lunch at English Bay today. Brian even showed up despite not getting the message until we were already there. Then Neal came along and I went and had a coffee with him. Nice that Neal and Dan could finally meet.

Yesterday I watched Startup.com on Newsworld of all places. What a fascinating documentary on Govworks.com. They were a dot com that went through the typical idea phase, out of control growth and then implosion cycle that was so common back in the day.

What made it interesting was watching this take place from the founders point of view. I’ve been on the other side of the wall many times but it was interesting to see it from that perspective.

The film closed with a shot of of the empty cubes in the office, which I have also seen many times. What was funny was the founders went on to start a company to help distressed dot coms. I’ll be willing to bet that was a growth market that eventually dried up. Maybe I should start a company helping distressed tech workers…