Trojans…
First, let me dispell any misapprehension you might have regarding this post: it is not about condoms.
Now that I have that out of the way, what *is* this post about? Yesterday I was checking out other blogs by doing some searches on Technorati. One of the ones I clicked on caused my virus checker to throw a fit. Apparently, the site I was going to redirected me to http://please click run to remove virus .c4tdownload.com/click_run_to_remove_virus.exe. Firstly, I thought I was going to a blog, not a software install, and secondly, the “virus remover” was actually a trojan (Win32:Trojan-gen. {Other}).
Images of our life..
I managed to make a new banner image for this site…what do you think?
Okay, so its really not very new. I took my old Kelly’s World banner image, spread the pictures around, and made the title larger. I’m not an artist- wanna make something out of it? 🙂
Random picture from my gallery…
My old PHPNuke personal site had some nice features. I had no real intention of throwing them away when I switched over to WordPress here, but I also had no idea how I was going to get them back.
Terrorism losing it’s edge?
Kelly asks the question: is there a law of diminishing return for acts of terror?
Fun with Ecto
Kelly makes Ecto work with Mandrake 10 and WordPress...feeding his inner Geek along the way.
What the heck is this?
Blogging…I’m pretty sure that term was invented by the same group of irritating people who more recently came up with “podcasting”.
I’ve had what I call a “vanity” website for about 9 years now. I have been posting stuff about myself, that interests me, or that I wanted to experiment with all that time. But I’ve never really called what I do “blogging”, even though my most recent website incarnation has looked an awful lot like a blog.
Lo, I have sunk into the depths of consumerisim…
I am far from being a "trendy" kind of guy. I tend to be either ahead or behind the curve in terms of whats cool and whats not. Case in point: I had my first "website" before the Internet existed...okay, it was a BBS, but it was up and running in 1980. Arguably it was a blog, since I posted opinion pieces, and it was as close to the 'web' as you could get in 1980. And it had a forum of sorts. I was 16 at the time, and in those days no one except a real loser had a computer. Flash forward to 2005. Everyone is on the Internet. Blogs are the "new" cool thing. Years ago, all the trendy folks started buying iPods. I was pretty skeptical, and even recently I stated some rather negative opinions about the gadget itself. But I finally went out a couple of weeks ago and bought an iPod. I was seduced... ...the little gadgets carry gigabytes of music around. In the case of the one I bought, 20 gigabytes. My entire existing digital music library is only about 3 gigabytes. But worse than that...a couple of months before I bought the iPod, I connected up to iTunes. And that was what did me in: quick and easy access to music the way I want it. I pay my $0.99 per song, I can pick and chose the songs I want from a library of something like a million tunes, I can burn them on CDs, play them on my computer (up to five different computers), or play them on...an iPod. I found iTunes hit the magical "sweet" spot for me: I want to legitimately pay for my music, but I don't want to be robbed of my right to choose how and when I want to play it. Sure, I'd rather pay a more reasonably $0.49 a song or something, but iTunes seems for me at least to be a reasonable compromise between what I want and what the music industry seems to demand. Why not go the subscription music route, like Napster or whatever? That way, you get as many songs as you can squeeze onto your hard drive, all for one monthly fee. The whole "subscription" music idea bothered me: paying a monthly fee to pick any music I want sounds good on the surface, until you realize the music stops playing when you stop paying...all of the music. And to make this "it disables when the fee runs out" work, the music is encumbered with a ton of digital rights management stuff. Sure, you can hack that stuff out by re-recording, but I have no desire to feel like I'm "cheating" or "breaking the law": I figure the music companies should either offer me music the way I want it, or I simply won't buy the stuff and I'll listen to the radio instead. I bought the iPod because it works and plays well with iTunes. I can't say I'm overly impressed by how well it works: Apple seems to have some problems dealing with the Windows XP environment, and I've had a couple of "hiccups" when transferring music to my iPod. The worst so far was when it started "pretend" synchronizing- the "syncing your iPod" message would appear and then the "safe to remove" message, but nothing was being transferred. A full reset/re-imaging of the iPod fixed that, but the average user wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. iTunes itself is great, but the Windows iTunes to iPod experience isn't perfect...maybe a 7 out of 10. But the "iTunes accessories" experience is awesome and more than makes up for the "iTunes under Windows talking to iPod" problems. Just for the existence of a huge selection of add-on gadgets, cases, connection kits, speakers, and so on alone...I would say the iPod is worth the premium compared to other comparable portable music devices. Find a 20 GB mp3 player: it will probably cost you about $300. An iPod of the same size will cost you $350...I'm saying that difference is probably worth it. Netting it out, am I happy with my iPod? Yes, for sure. Has it transformed my life, taken existence to a higher plane, made me want to have Steve Job's children? Hell no. It's a well designed gadget, which is good. I still think Steve Jobs is an arrogant prick with a grossly over-inflated reputation (most of his "genius" was stolen, quite literally, from much smarter people like Steve Wozniak). And Apple has no one's best interests at heart other than their own...so the fact that some of the stuff they make is good does not elevate them to some sort of religious and philosophical greatness.
Computer upgrade 2005…
Well, its that time of year again...time for me to break my computer in the name of geekdom...
For 2005, my objective was a bit different- stick mostly to upgrades that can be transferred to the next "version" of my computer- things that I don't need to throw away in a year. Because the next upgrade will be large- in 2006, I expect to move to a new motherboard supporting PCI Express slots, which means a new video card, and while I'm at it, an new processor...ouch. So, for this year I'm replacing my monitor, my memory, and my hard drive subsystem. In some respects, I wish I'd stuck to just those things but, since I had to reformat the hard drive as part of the upgrade (see later in this posting), it seemed like a good time to upgrade the OS... The big news in the past few days was that the 64 bit version of Windows XP was released to manufacturing. What this means is that the code is basically "finished". Since I'm an MSDN subscriber, I was able to get the RTM (release to manufacturing) version and install it as part of my 2005 computer upgrade. Yes, don't worry: I'll buy a full "normal" license later. As an aside, I understand Microsoft will be offering free upgrades to Windows XP Professional 64 for people who bought Windows XP Professional: I'm not sure about that, though. Why care about 64 bit Windows? The immediate benefits from 64 bit Windows versus 32 bit Windows boils down to memory addressing, both real and virtual. Big applications, and games are a prime example here, have been butting up against all sorts of memory space limits. This isn't just the 4 GB RAM limit: there are much smaller limits for certain types of paging objects that, with XP 64, are blown wide open. What this means is that applications that use lots of memory should be faster and more capable. Other benefits start to accrue once more and more applications are written natively as 64 bit apps. 64 bit processing, done right, should be faster: on the order of 10-15% faster. However...initially, when running 32 bit applications under a 64 bit OS, there will be some potential performance degredation...from what's been tested thus far, from 0 to 5%. Both AMD (Athlon) and Intel (the new Pentium 4s and the rather unpopular server processor, the Itanium) now have 64 bit processors. Its probably inevitable that most users will be using one sometime in the next 3 to 5 years. But if you don't upgrade your computer often or at all, don't play large/complex games or run memory-hog applications like image or video editing...really, you won't see much need for a 64 bit OS. Oh, and by the way: a 64 bit OS only works on a 64 bit processor- I'm probably stating the obvious, but... My upgrade this year...Note I make several references here to "EQ2" (EverQuest 2) performance. Thats a game I play a lot and, thus far, is the only game I've installed. I'll add some other performance comments later once I've had time to install several more games...yes, I play a lot of computer games :-)
- part #1: a 20" LCD 1600x1200 flat panel monitor (ViewSonic VP201s). I got this a month or so ago. Its working out great: no visible "trailing" and fast refresh, very sharp and bright with "rich" colours, viewable from wide angles
- part #2: memory upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB (Corsair Platinum series paired high speed 1 GB DDR); installed without a hitch Thursday night and made a noticable but small difference in EQ2 performance
- part #3: a RAID 0 array using 2 x Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000 RPM SATA drives; a little challenging to install because you have to use supplemental drivers during the XP install; the performance increase was immediately noticable. Zoning in EQ2 still takes time, but its probably half as long (guessing) and just seems smoother. Exiting the game no longer results in a minute or so of disk thrashing...
- part #4: re-install OS...this is where I decided at the last moment to go with Windows XP 64. If I made a "mistake" in this upgrade, this was it
- Before: Maxtor 7,200 RPM SATA drive (single drive): Drive index of 40 mbps
- After: Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 pair: Drive index of 105 mbps