Yesterday I migrated my blog to WordPress, as LifeType was outdated and pretty buggy. While I liked LifeType, it’s nice to be using a more standard blogging software that supports all the latest APIs. The transition was simple, I merely installed WordPress, and then set LifeType to publish all my posts in it’s RSS feed, which I had WordPress import. WordPress was smart enough to add the posts and categories from my old blog.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
While on the train back from my girlfriend's house, I whiled away the hours making ThinkLink, a site that uses various association techniques to find others while think like you. After signing up, you just type the first thing that pops into your head when you read the idea, or look at the picture. After doing 20+ of these, you can click on your name to see other's who made the same associations as you did, I just did it to keep myself busy, but it's very interesting to see how closely some of my best friends are linked together, even though they have not met. It's still very much in its infancy, but feel free to give it a shot.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
It seems these days that while more and more companies are releasing the APIs and SDK for their products, that a few companies are trying to hold on tighter and tigher. The iPod for example used to be open enough so you could use third-party software to access it, and even write your own. Now however, they have gone the way of the Zune and made it so only iTunes can access it, which effectively locks out Linux users who don't want to go through loop-holes. Also, with every iPhone firmware update, it un-unlocks the phone and removes any third party applications. I am curious why, take the iPhone for example, if anything more people would want to buy one if they can put custom applications on it, and make it more useful for their personal needs. Also, for the Zune and iPod, it would let your hardware reach a larger audience and sell more players. It all seems quite rediculous; many companies are making their profits on selling open devices for people to use as they wish.
It's very sad that companies must restrict their users in this way, I always think, when I see a Zune, or other locked down piece of software how much better that software could be (*cough* Vista *cough*) if all that time and evergy spent on trying (and failing) to lock down the product was spent on improving it.
Happy new year,
Ranok
Well, today I helped diffuse a botnet by destroying it's control method. Some of you may not know, but I happen to be a services operator on CAIRC, and I was noticing some strange connect lines, with users from all over with the nick: XP|USA|000|2394 that were all idling in a channel called #V3NOM. So I decided to join and see what was going on, and lo and behold, there were about 10 of them idling along, not responding to any message or private messages. I looked at their IPs and they were connecting from all over (Belgium, USA, Estonia, etc…) so I assumed that they were part of a botnet. I started by taking over the channel and setting the mode to +mutn (so they couldn't talk and see anyone else in the channel), just to neutralize any control mechanism, and I set a JAKILL (regex AKILL) which easily took them all out
This is my second botnet that I detected and stopped, though this one was larger than the other one. So hopefully I'm doing my part to help slow the growth of the "zombie armies".
EDIT: After talking with the other IRCops, it was decided to let them join, but join the channel with a bot like nick, hopefully gathering the passwords so we can remove/disarm the bots.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
For many of you, this week ahead is one of stress, late nights and falling asleep on a pile of books. I want to wish everyone the best of luck on your exams, and I hope that everyone has a happy and healthy vacation, regardless of what you choose to do with it.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
I recently install Bitlbee on the comm image so that people who want to chat on IRC don't need to have a separate client open to chat with those who are less enlightened. All you need to to do is connect to the Bitlee server, and register your other IM accounts (Oscar/Jabber/MSN) and then it populates the 'control channel' with your buddies. Then it's a simple process of typing <BuddyName>: <msg> to send them a msg, or /msging them to chat with them in a separate window/tab. A very cool thing to play with overall.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
Yesterday, I installed the latest version (5RC2) of the open source (YPL) groupware suite Zimbra. After messing with the /etc/hosts file (zimbra is not a fan of IPv6 entries) and tricking it into thinking my Ubuntu 7.10 was 6.10 (modifying /etc/lsb-release and /etc/debian-version) it installed quite easily. After getting it installed, I figured out that I had done it wrong, and I was unable to send/receive emails (my MX records were incorrect). Asside from that, I love it, it's feature-filled, easy to use, and very simple to manage through the web administration console. I like how it has a built in Jabber/Oscar/MSN client, and has a shared documents and calendar system, making it very easy to keep group projects organized. Overall, it's a very nice system, and after some more testing on a beefier machine (one of the blades) I hope to show it off to OIT as an alternative to Exchange, which is very miserable to use.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
Hello,
After spending way too much time on I Can Has Cheezburger looking at funny cats, I decided to use their LOL builder to make my own. Please be aware that it's my first attempt, so it may not be that good.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
Some of you may have seen the rough logo I whipped up in Inkscape for COSI, and it's been more popular than I imagined. So in reply to Max's email about watching COSI copyright use, I made this little (ugly) page which basically is me giving the COSI logo away to the public domain, to do whatever they want to with it. I got a very official email from the Creative Commons stating that "Jacob Ian Torrey dedicated to the public domain the work "COSI Logo."". I'm just very glad that this is one less thing some big company is going to steal, or sue over (not that they would anyways). I'm rather sick of patent trolls, and lawsuits, so I'm going to start giving quite a bit of IP away, where it should go.
Peace and chow,
Ranok
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone can enjoy a few days with family and friends. As per Todd's request, here is the package that lets you suspend and hibernate on my IBM T60 when no other method worked.
Install 'uswsusp' and then run either s2disk to hibernate, or s2ram to suspend. Enjoy!
Peace and much chow,
Ranok
