Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
Thirteen high school students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania have been criminally charged for “hacking” their high school provided laptops. Some relatives of the teenagers have set up a website to tell their side of the story.
Google is supposedly about to start providing RSS feeds of their Google News headlines. That's great, and I guess I'll have to switch over from using my own Google feed…
On August 6, 60 years ago, Hiroshima was written into history in the worst way possible. It became the first city to be struck by a nuclear weapon. Three days later, Nagasaki became the second and last city to earn such distinction.
Sigh…try to do one little thing to fix a configuration problem, and a dozen bugs show up.
If you are a website admin and use PHPNuke, this might interest you. Many (?) Linux distributions are now shipping with a PHP configuration setting called “register_globals” set to “Off”. This is a good thing for security as described by the PHP documentation. Unfortunately, it seems that PHPNuke has a ton of places where globals are used “incorrectly”.
I have to admit to occasionally having difficulty understanding why the line “it was a dark and stormy night” is subject to such derision in literary circles. I mean, seriously: it doesn’t sound that bad. It almost sounds like something I might write. Oh…
Microsoft has been working on their next generation operating system, codenamed “Longhorn”, for several years now. Its been delayed several times, had features stripped … and now has been given a poofey sounding name: Windows Vista. That name smacks of desperation, as in “dammit, this is so late we can’t use a year, and it has no really compelling features that suggest a good acronym, so we better come up with some buzz or spin that will get people to buy it without any practical reason…”
James Doohan, better known to the world as Montgomery Scott or just “Scotty”, passed away on Wednesday.
I actually met the man himself once, although only in passing. It was at a science fiction convention in about 1989, and I think he was “three sheets to the wind” at the time. But no one at the convention really cared- he hugged a few convention goers and told a couple of jokes, and mostly was a real live human- not a character in a movie, but a boisterous and very alive man.
When Irene and I were at Harrison Hotsprings last weekend, we noticed a beautiful golden coloured dog laying near where some conference-type people had set up their sign-in table. We walked past this dog several times- she was obviously a service dog, and lay on the floor near one of the tables with statuesque grace. She watched us when we passed, obviously interested in what was going on, but dedicated to her job and her human.
I’m still awake, and its 1:00 am on a work day. Why am I still up, you ask?
Well, its like this. The other day I edited one of my website configuration files…Vhosts.conf, which will be meaningless unless you’ve ever configured an Apache web server. Anyway, I fixed a problem whereby my “default” virtual website was solstice.kgadams.net, instead of www.kgadams.net. And in the process, I apparently broke my log file configuration.
My main personal computer crashed last week, as I mentioned on July 12. I managed to get everything working again, with one exception- standby mode.