Mostly about my amusement
Scientists at an Italian observatory this year succeeded in firing lasers at the mirror-covered Ajisai Japanese satellite, proving that a sequence of photons can travel great distances through space.
It’s an article about quantum key encryption but the title made me laugh. Larry Niven has been writing about communication lasers almost as long as he’s been writing.
NY Times has a cool map to see what’s at the end of a train line.
On Saturday August 9th, my car got broken into and the Nuvi 360 was stolen. The window was fixed last week and today I received the replacement navigation unit. This time with a no-slip dashboard stand.
Lily and I thought about which one to buy. Rather than getting the latest and greatest, we just opted for the same model. It works really well, has good Bluetooth support, and I’m used to it. Also it was several hundred dollars cheaper than when I first bought it. Why mess with what I’m used to?
Our next car will almost certainly have GPS built in, so this one is destined for my MINI Cooper.
This time I’m using the Garmin lock feature. It works like this: when the GPS unit comes on and it’s at home, it just works. When I’m away from home it will ask for a PIN. If I forget the PIN and can’t take it to it’s home position, then I’ll have to send it to Garmin to have it unlocked. I’m registering this new one with Garmin.
This won’t prevent my window from being smashed (yeah, yeah, I’m not leaving the unit in my car anymore) but if someone does steal it, at least it will be useless to the next person.
My Vista 64 bit OS has been acting a little flaky for a long time. The latest symptom was my DHCP client not working. When Dell did the free motherboard swap upgrade, I was supposed to re-install the OS then. But I procrastinated and just waited till the pain got bad.
My XPS 700720 came with Windows XP Media Center Edition. When the upgrade came out, I purchased it from Best Buy. I sent in the $19 and received the Vista 64 bit version DVD in the mail. For months I’ve been using the Vista 64 bit version.
My plan was to do the following:
That was the plan. Except the DVD would not install software, no way no how.
The bootable DVD HATED my 4 GB of high performance RAM. I kept getting the BSOD before I could install anything. Now Vista running has no problem with my RAM upgrade. But the installer on the upgrade DVD refused to do anything except BSOD. Lucky I kept the old slow speed 2 GB or RAM so I was able to get past that problem.
The upgraded DVD did not like my drives. It’s not exactly a clean install that it does. The target drive has to be formatted and a WINDOWS directory, or something in the WINDOWS directory, needs to exist. If it’s not then the installer will refuse to copy files onto your disk.
I had to insert step 3.5 into my plan. I was able to get around this by booting off of my Windows XP install DVD that came with my PC and began to install the old version onto my system. I did not have to complete the install. Once files started to be copied I rebooted with my Vista SP1 upgrade. Then I was able to proceed as planned.
The one piece of unexpected good news is that the fresh upgrade install activated online successfully. I was sure I’d have to do the 1-800-NOT-EXTORTION-EXACTLY call to Microsoft just to activate my software.
Microsoft might be good with apps (debatable) but their OS’s always requires a rebuild after a period of time. It’s just how it is since the registry just collects garbage from adding and removing hardware and software.
If my PC came with Vista then in theory I should have had an easier time of it. Just pop in the vendor supplied rebuild DVD and off you go. In the past that’s always what I did. With this Vista upgrade, I should be able to install cleanly without the tricks.
The fact that I have to install an upgrade on top of a clean install that I just did is bizarre. It shows that either the clean install was a mistake on their part or they put it in because they knew this scenario would exist.
They should include and support this for their upgrade too. A little online documentation would have been helpful.
Well I ripped the band-aid off and did the upgrade. It feels like 2.5.5 or something, not as big a deal as 2.3 to 2.5 was.
I keep almost all of my files in wp-content so upgrading was not difficult. I shut down my web server, renamed the old directory for the blog root, and used SVN to get a copy of 2.6 and moved the old contents to wp-content.
Once that was done, I started up the web server and ran the wp-admin/upgrade.php. It was quick and painless. Everyone should backup their 2.5.1 installation (files and database) and do the upgrade once 2.6 is tar’ed up and placed on the web site.
Some changes:
There are lots more changes of course; I’m just using it now. So far it’s definitely worthwhile upgrade.
Going to look at it some more, but I may be upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.6 tonight. The SVN update I just did say wp-includes/version.php is 2.6.
Since the Disney trip, I’ve been playing around with the camera more than ever. Marking your photos with geographical location info is cool and I’m thinking of getting a GPS fob/software combination.
In my searching I located this discussion on Flickr. It’s a bookmarklet (that is NOT a word) that lets you easily insert map info on your Flickr pictures. Unlike Flickr’s map info, this one is based on Google Maps and is loads easier to search location by name.
Here is a link to Flickr map for an Epcot fire works picture I took. Here is the additional link that the script inserted when I filled out the info. It’s linked to loc.alize.us and is very cool.
The loc.alize.us website is very Firefox friendly; Internet Explorer 7 chokes on the site.
Woo hoo, I see that WordPress 2.6-RC1 came with today’s SVN updates.
So far it looks and feels like 2.5.1 with some tweaks. The Google Gears portion, better plug-in management, and now arranging widgets works. When it is released as 2.6 I’ll upgrade this blog.
I’ll also get ready for the cries of support forum users who insist 2.5.1 get upgraded and maintained.
I use Google Reader to follow blogs and one of the RSS feeds I have is from Slashdot. A few days ago they had a posting called Gmail, SPF, and Broken Email Forwarding? which was a topic I was interested in.
I use a Blackberry for e-mail and I gave up I using SPF for my domain. It just could not work when legitimate e-mail came from another set of unknown servers. The work around is much more complicated than SPF.
So I went to that page looking to see if anyone had anything useful to contribute.
It was Slashdot at it’s finest. The most useful comment was a comment about RFC 2606.
Please stop using mydomain.com and other such nonsense. Example.com is reserved by RFC 2606 [ietf.org] for use as a…wait for it…example domain name. Please make a habit of using it instead of whatever name strikes your fancy, as it is probably in use by real people.
Followed by
For God’s sake. It’s just text! RFC 2606 doesn’t specify what you’re allowed to write in a text message.
I didn’t need to read much more than that. I stopped visiting Slashdot in my browser a long time ago, time to clean up my RSS feeds.
Well not really panic, just your usual vulnerability patching day at the office.
When I saw Dan Kaminsky demonstrate voice over DNS, I was convinced that he dreams in BIND source code. It was a neat demonstration.
Now he has uncovered another vulnerability in BIND regarding UDP source port prediction. It’s causing some excitement in the work place as to what the impact could be and how soon our vendors can release patches.
I’ve had to do some explaining as what it means; see Matasano’s blog for more information. Thomas Ptacek sums it up really well here and states the impact more here.
You’ve got to love someone who can explain the seriousness using a movie quote from Jack Black.
