Archive for August, 2007

I can’t tell you how many times I have been walking from our gazebo in the backyard to the back door and tripped over something I could not see. I like to sit out there with the laptop to do some of my work, but I think it’s beyond time to start looking at outdoor lighting for the walkway, before I break a leg or something.

I am working feverishly on getting the next version of Stuffr out the door. Most of the changes in this version are behind the scenes, and other than one bug fix most users won’t notice much difference.

I plan to release it sometime tomorrow night (Saturday night).

– Powered By Stuffr! –

From Christopher Null’s site at Yahoo!:

After many weeks of misinformation, Microsoft has finally offered public, official information on the upcoming beta release of Vista’s first Service Pack, aka SP1.

Apparently, the beta is already in some testers hands, and will be released to the public within a few weeks. Don’t you love how Microsoft keeps releasing beta software to the unsuspecting masses?

Poor masses.

On this second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, please take a moment to remember the victims. More than 1.1 million volunteers have responded to help but more are still needed, and many homes have still not been rebuilt.

Oh sure, everyone knows about the “refugees” of Hurricane Katrina, and many of us, myself included, have our own horror stories about “non-victims” who attempted to take advantage of the system or even demanded that people “take care of them”. But I am not concerned with those people now, as they have disappeared back into the slimy little holes they crawled out of. The people I am concerned about are the real victims of Katrina. The people who took all the proper precautions and fled when they knew the storm was bearing down on them.

Since the day of the disaster, Americans have donated over 14 million hours of volunteer service to help rebuild New Orleans and the other affected areas. This has been the single biggest volunteer response to a disaster in our nation’s history, but there are still many jobs to be done, lots of work to be completed, and many people who still cannot return to their homes.

Several people I know had homes in the affected areas, and luckily most of them have been able to return or have settled elsewhere around the country, but let’s take a moment out of our day and do what we can to help. Heck, I’m not asking you to volunteer, or even donate money, I’m simply asking you to help raise awareness so others will remember as well.

It took a while for me to decide that I wanted to start blogging about my programming projects and software in general. The Alligator Pit is still in a process of constant flux, as I continue to decide exactly which direction to take it. Should I concentrate solely on my own programming projects? Would it be better to focus on internet news (there are a ton of sites that already do this), or should I start posting pictures of women who are nearly naked, and talk about open tip bras and that sort of thing?

Come on people, help me decide.

We spent the last couple days sweltering in the summer heat. My desk is right next to a window on the south side of the house and it gets super hot, and I have no view. It sure would be nice to have some nc waterfront property, I’m just saying…

It looks as though AllOfMP3 is on its way back.

I guess, since a Russian court ruled they did not violate Russian copyright laws, they plan to re-open shop.

I just checked my Yahoo! mail account and I don’t see any changes yet, but then again, it’s still early. I will check again later today and see what the new toys are like.

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news)/span>. will introduce new features Monday for its popular Web-based e-mail program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone’s cell phone.

The enhancements make it easier to send e-mail, instant messages or text messages from a single Web site — no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices. The features will be available to users in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines.

[Source: AP via Yahoo! News]

I spent the weekend cleaning up the one area I have to store things (other than the garage). I sorted all of the old cd rom drives, hard drives and other computer parts I have, and I even cleaned up my tool storage area. I haven’t organized that room in 4 years, so it needed some work. It took a couple hours but I got it all done.

This is not the news I wanted to hear while I am sitting here enjoying my weekend.

An old worm known as Slammer, which originated back in January 2003, is still going strong according to Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy at IBM’s Internet Security Systems (IBM ISS).

Ollmann, the author of the white paper “Old threats never die”, says that Slammer is still the threat most commonly encountered by IBM ISS.

…

“Antivirus systems can handle tens of thousands of new signatures without blinking, but after a few hundred thousand they begin to struggle a bit,” he wrote in a blog post this week. “Now, with several hundred thousand new virus strains each year (and increasing faster than Moore’s Law), things are getting pretty creaky.”

Why doesn’t someone write a virus that attacks other viruses instead? They’re doing it in medicine so it only makes sense that they can do it with computers.