While looking for a place to sit in a jam-packed, standing-room-only food court:
David: It will all work out in the end.
Me: No. No, it won’t. Entropy pretty much guarantees that.
David: This isn’t a closed system.
So. One of the guys who I work with has an external FireWire hard drive on which he has hundreds of gigabytes of stuff. Business stuff, personal stuff, original artwork stuff, photography stuff, company Web site stuff, corporate flyer stuff, and much other stuff.
This stuff is not backed up.
Today he tells me the drive won’t mount. A quick sniff with a disk repair program suggests that the drive’s partition map is gone. Not corrupt, not garbled, gone.
I’m running a surface scan with a file salvaging program now. It’s gonna take all night.
*sigh*
So I have an iPhone now, which places me firmly in the ranks of the coveted “hipster” segment of the “consumer whore” demographic. One of the neat features of the new iPhone is GPS; in fact, it’s the reason I got the phone, since I was in the market for a GPS device and the iPhone plus GPS is actually cheaper than stand-alone GPS units.
Anyway, my roommate David also got an iPhone, and has been busy playing with the GPS on it like…well, I don’t really have a metaphor. Like a guy who’s having a lot of fun with a GPS gadget, I suppose.
The iPhone is now open to third-party developers, and the Cocoa API has been extended dramatically with all sorts of calls related to power management, Bluetooth, and GPS functionality. In other words, the GPS system is exposed to third-party developers.
David, who actually isn’t a perv, came up with an interesting idea, that he calls the “Virtual Leash.” His conception is of a sex toy like a vibrator, preferably Bluetooth-enabled (though I suppose USB would work as well), designed to be locked into place in one’s girlfriend. The device would be controlled by software on the iPhone that would monitor the wearer’s position via GPS, so that if she left some pre-determined area, the vibrator would start running. At full speed. And not stop until she returned to that area.
Neither my mad Bluetooth hacking skillz nor my iPhone development skillz are up to tackling this project, but I know several folks on my flist could probably make it work. Any takers?
This has been a hella productive past few days, and I am well and truly pleased.
The first chapter of the book on polyamory is done, finished, put a fork in it. Proposals have been sent out. Chpter 2 is started. Chapter 3 is halfway done.
Downed the first two bosses in Serpentshrine Caverns and the first two bosses in Tempest Keep with my new raiding guild. My mage rocks like a rocky thing. It’s just a pity she’s Alliance.
Got a surprise phone call on Friday. The attacks against iPower Web, which are not only ongoing but are getting more sophisticated (since I wrote that last, the number of compromised iPower sites has surged again), are coming to the attention of iPower’s customers. I received a phone call from a woman whose site had been hacked (twice!), and she had iPower on the phone when she called me.
The tech support monkeys at iPower told her that–get this–there’s no vulnerability on their servers, and that her account was compromised because the attackers brute-forced her FTP password. Which was…err, sixteen characters, both letters and numbers, long.
*blink*
Anyway, she gave them the what-for and pulled all her sites off iPower. Maybe if they start losing enough customers, they’ll fix their damn security.
And on the subject of Web sites, I’ve updated mine. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I have a book in print and can’t keep tinkering with it.
Last night, David and I tried playing as a team against six computer opponents in Age of Empires II. High difficulty, lowest resource setting. It was a humiliating debacle. We well and truly got our asses handed to us. Barely made it into the Imperial Age before the computer’s armies closed around us and systematically scraped us off the map.
In two weeks I’ll be in Chicago; planning to be there from the 19th through the 24th. Looking forward to spending time with dayo and scathedobsidian, I know you’ll be around. amorsalado, purplebard, will you guys be available?
…I installed a copy of the old-school (circa 1997) real-time strategy game Age of Empires II on David’s computer, then networked his computer with mine.
I suspect neither of us will be sleeping tonight. “Now, watch! Watch as I smash your village with my siege onagers of DOOM! Hear the wailing of your women and children; they are as music to my ears!”
Quote of the day (via Shelly):
“You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not, however, entitled to your own facts.”
And finally, via physicsduck, recreation for people who think that base jumping is too boring and safe. Dear God. I can’t believe that this actually worked, and nobody died.
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/inocaj/2004/43/i11/abs/ic0352250.html
“Two novel ruthenium polypyridine complexes, [Ru(bpy)2Cl(BPEB)](PF6) and {[Ru(bpy)2Cl]2(BPEB)}(PF6)2 (BPEB = trans-1,4-bis[2-(4-pyridyl)ethenyl]benzene), were synthesized and their characterization carried out by means of elemental analysis, UV-visible spectroscopy, positive ion electrospray (ESI-MS), and tandem mass (ESI-MS/MS) spectrometry,” reads the abstract, “as well as by NMR spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry.”
But oh, those wacky chemists. You have got to see the accompanying illustration of the macroscale molecular complexes in question.
The world’s first scanning tunneling microscope, outfitted to do double duty as an atomic force microscope. This machine was invented at IBM Zurich in 1981; its creators won a Nobel Prize in 1986. And yes, it really is one of the coolest pieces of tech in the world.
See that orange round thing in the lower right hand corner? It’s an Arizona Iced Tea can. Some things in experimental physics never change. 😉
So far today, I have created a new brochure for one of our distributors, found and fixed a very subtle and deeply-buried PHP bug in a commercial video sharing software package that a friend of mine bought, and discovered a massive Russian Business Network attack on the ISP softlayer.com in which thousands of Web sites hosted by them and their downstream customers have been compromised.
I also had a very tasty quesadilla for lunch. And it’s not even 1:00 yet.
Tonight, I think I’ll write some pr0n, track down another RBN hack attack I may have sniffed out against sites running phpBB, and try to level my warrior’s blacksmithing skill in World of Warcraft. Maybe I’ll document the security breach at Softlayer as well. Looks like a zero-day exploit against cPanel.
*tests hackersluts.com on a bunch of browsers*
*notices weird display glitches in Internet Explorer for Windows*
*spends two and a half hours digging through the CSS*
*bashes head into desk*
*reads up on Explorer’s lame, braindead, broken CSS rendering*
*spends another half hour beating on CSS*
*cries*
Jumping Jiminy Christ on a pogo stick, how in the hell did Microsoft ever become the dominant force in the IT industry with such poorly-written, inherently broken, crap software? Internet Explorer…what a festering pile of crapware that browser is! Working around bugs in its CSS support is something of a blood sport in Web circles.
See, this is why all my other Web sites don’t use CSS.
*gets it to work, finally*