On Guns, Politics, Books, and Everyday Life
November 7th, 2009
I occasionally have an ISO file that I need to run from within Windows. Burning them to a CD is a pain in the rear, so I found a neat utility called MagicDisk. It does a lot more than just mounting ISOs, but it is the easiest to use app for this purpose that I have used. You can also create ISOs and mount multiple virtual drives with it. The software can be downloaded from:
http://www.magiciso.com/
November 4th, 2009
I bought two 25.5″ monitors and a GeForce 285 yesterday. Full of awesome. Now I think I need a new motherboard, proc, and memory to go along.
April 16th, 2009
Okay, so my song for this week is “O Fortuna”, which we have all heard a million times. It is a great piece, and one of my favorites in all of classical music.
The video is a bit…different.
The creator took three different remixes of O Fortuna, and made this epic Akira video with them.
So you get Akira. +10
O Fortuna +10
Crazy Aphex Twin remix of O Fortuna +10
This adds +30 to your dork quotient, if you watch this video, and get either giddy, or teary-eyed.
Categories: Entertainment, Tech | Tags: geekery | 3 Comments
April 15th, 2009
Borepatch has a post up about XSS (cross site scripting). It is an all too commonly allowed loophole that allows script kiddies to do all kinds of things. For a demonstration, that is totally benign, click the comments link.
Edit: Wordpress DOES clean up the input of normal users, while allowing higher level users to create scripts. This is acceptable, assuming no one gets access to your login. Of course, JavaScript injection is probably among the least of your worries if that happens.
Categories: Tech | Tags: geekery | 4 Comments
April 1st, 2009
PureText is an awesome little utility that allows you to paste plain text anywhere. Whenever you copy text from a website for example, the clipboard stores the formatting as well. So when you go to paste it into an email, it includes whatever formatting was being used on the website.
I assume this was an inovation at some point, but I find it irritating to the extreme.
This little app allows you to use Windows Key+V to paste the plain text of whatever it is you copied.
No more copying text into Notepad, and then into the destination for me!
http://stevemiller.net/PureText/
Categories: Tech | Tags: geekery | No Comments
March 31st, 2009
So, a while back I turned on comment moderation, because the blog was receiving tons of spam. This has stopped the visible spam completely of course, but I still get tons of it every day.
Wordpress also allows you to block posts that have certain strings in their url, email, subject, or body as well. Adding a few things like .ru, and some other common spam URL bits, I have cut it down to almost nothing. Unfortunately now all I have to deal with seems to be male enhancement pill posts.
Categories: Tech | Tags: blog matters | No Comments
March 26th, 2009
Today is a sad day. I said goodbye to an old friend today. A good friend. A friend I could count on.
We just shut down my Lotus Domino Development server here at work. We have been phasing out Domino for about four years now, and have not built any new apps on it in years. As our department has shrunk recently, we have made it a priority to consolidate servers and decommission unnecessary ones.
So, about ten minutes ago, I entered the final q command in the Domino console, and turned out the lights on good ‘ol DOMINO-DEV. While I moved on long ago, to Java, and now .NET, I still did a bit of Domino development every few months. I would dutifully use my good friend to test my changes, and he never let me down.
I will never forget the day he was built. A shiny new 1-U Dell 1650, all for me. I was the only user that logged onto my little buddy, and as I said, he never failed me, in all these years. We had finally set up a proper environment. I no longer had to worry about crashing a production box, and I could hack to my hearts desire, with no worried, of an angry boss calling, because the website had gone down.
Farewell friend, you will be missed.
Categories: History, Life, Tech | Tags: geekery | No Comments
February 5th, 2009
My wife sent me a link to this neat social site yesterday.
It is a networking site for people who enjoy reading. You create a virtual bookshelf for books you have read, are reading, and want to read. You can have friends and groups like any other social site of course. The software also allows you to review and comment on the books. Their review capabilities are pretty limited however. So far I have not figured out how to create links in the reviews, but some simple HTML formatting tags work. Another neat feature is the ability to track loaned books.
The site seems fairly new, and they have some work to do still, but so far I like it.
Oh yeah, you can create widgets for your blog, like the one on the right that shows what I am currently reading.
So, if you are so inclined, join up, and send me a friend invite.
Categories: Tech | Tags: geekery | No Comments
January 16th, 2009
According to Engadget, It looks like Circuit City is going to go fully belly up and be liquidated. This sucks, as I liked their stores better than Best Buy generally, and it sucks for the remaining employees.
I do, however, smell some sweet deals coming.
Categories: Tech | No Comments
