It appears that the script kiddies are planning to try to deface a bunch of websites on July 6th.

The government and private technology experts warned Wednesday that hackers plan to attack thousands of Web sites Sunday in a loosely coordinated “contest” that could disrupt Internet traffic.

Organizers established a Web site, defacers-challenge.com, which was shut down early Wednesday evening. Before it was removed, the site listed in broken English the rules for hackers who might participate. It cautioned that “deface its crime”—an apparent acknowledgment that vandalizing Internet pages is illegal.

I guess these pathetic fools have nothing better to do than to waste everyone’s time and money by monkeying with websites.

You never really know how secure your webhost is until someone tries to attack it.  For now, the best advice would be to make sure you have good backups of everything (including your databases) and to make sure you aren’t using any default or weak passwords. 

Link via Slashdot.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been having problems with my cable modem.  Or more specifically, it appears that Charter has been having problems, because the “cable” light on my modem keeps going off and I lose connection.  When it’s up, I don’t have any problems connecting, so I know my home network is OK.  There are no events I’ve been able to correlate to the outages (i.e. wind, rain, etc).  My suspicion is that they’re having a problem on their end (although there is a remote possibility that there is a problem with the wire from my house to their local connection point or the modem itself is going out).

Anyway, Charter’s support website requires that you install their spyware in order to use their “wizard.”  Since I won’t install that crap (I installed their software package when it first came out and it took over my browser and rebranded it; I had to reinstall Windows to get it back), I had to drop out to their web contact form.  This probably puts me somewhere below fungus on their priority list, so I’m not sanguine about the probability of a fix anytime soon.  I’ll probably have to call them and deal with the level 1 and 2 crap before I get someone who knows what’s going on.

In the meantime I probably won’t be making too many updates to this site, because everytime I get set to go online at home the cable modem is out.

Fry’s is a dangerous place for someone like me.  You can find all the parts you need to build a computer from scratch or upgrade one you already have.  I’ve only ever gone into a Fry’s once without buying something (something must have been wrong with me that day). 

But now it’s reached an absurd level.  I’ve got a friend who went there tonight and called me to tell me about the current deal on a motherboard and processor (2000+ Athlon XP with MB for $69.00).  So I got him to buy it for me and I’ll pay him for it tomorrow.  I’m going to use it to upgrade my game system.  However, that will leave me with a 900MHz Athlon and motherboard.  I have a spare case and hard drive.  I may build another system from the cast-off parts (although I have no idea what I’ll do with it).  But it seems a waste to just let the parts sit there.  Maybe I can find someone who’s using an old computer and needs/wants something a little faster.

I’m almost tempted to think that drugs would be cheaper than computers…

Slashdot has a review of an interesting new keyboard.  The idea behind this keyboard is to completely change the way you type so as to remove the risk of repetitive stress injury.  It seems interesting, although I have little interest in relearning how to type.  It’s also quite expensive at $695.00.

However, I found this part amusing:

Despite—or maybe because of—the OrbitTouch’s similarity to the female anatomy, it’s very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes.

  There is also a warning that the domes should not be twisted.  Good advice in most cases.

The folks at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications are experimenting with the use of the Sony Playstation 2 as a computing platform.  They’ve gone as far as creating a cluster of PS2s.  While this may sound weird, it actually makes a lot of sense.  The PS2 contains a custom CPU that is optimized for vector calculations (which are used quite a bit in graphics programming).  Further, a Linux kit is available for the PS2 that allows it to be used as a general purpose computing node.  The price-to-performance ratio makes it quite attractive, if the full potential of the chip can be obtained.

Besides, this is the sort of thing appeals to a geek on a deep level.  There’s something about taking something and doing something useful with it that it was never intended to do that brings a real sense of accomplishment.

Link via Slashdot.

Intuit has finally come to its senses regarding its stupid activation mechanism for TurboTax.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based software maker will discard its so-called product activation feature, the company announced Wednesday when it reported third-quarter earnings.

“Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn’t have the great experience they expect from Intuit,” Steve Bennett, chief executive of the company, said in a statement. “Therefore we’ve decided to discontinue product activation next season.”

The introduction of product activation technology in TurboTax for the 2002 tax year also failed to deliver the additional revenue and profit growth the company had anticipated, Bennett added. Even so, Intuit reported revenue rose by 29 percent and net income more than doubled in the quarter ended April 30, compared with the same period a year ago. The company said growth was driven by gains in its TurboTax business, which brought in $313.1 million in revenue for the quarter.

Product activation is a controversial antipiracy approach that locks a piece of software to a specific PC. Intuit’s version, developed by Macrovision, runs in the background on the PC and checks for a unique activation number generated when TurboTax is installed and stored on the PC’s hard drive. The technology is intended to prevent customers from printing or filing returns from any PC other than the original machine that was used to activate the software.

Customers complained, however, that the technology could make it difficult to continue using TurboTax if they were to acquire a new PC or hard drive. Many customers said they were annoyed that the product activation mechanism continually ran in the background, even when TurboTax wasn’t being used, monopolizing a small chunk of their PC’s memory.

All that the activation feature did was generate ill-will, complaints, and calls to tech support.  I know that I don’t like to pay for the priviledge of being treated like a thief.  In fact, I resolved never to purchase another piece of their desktop software (of any kind) as long as they continued using this activation software (and I only reluctantly used their online tax filing software, after I couldn’t get their competitor’s product to work).

And I don’t like the product activation crap in Windows XP, either, but their market position kind of forced me into using it (that and I didn’t want to have to deal with wiping and reinstalling my new laptop with Linux).

Now, perhaps I’ll consider purchasing Quicken again, since my foray into using Money ended badly.  I’m trying to find a good solution to keeping track of my accounts.  Despite being a techno-geek, I still maintain my bank account via an old-fashioned check register (and such high-tech devices as a pen and a calculator).  I ordered the BankOne branded version of Money (it had a 30-day free trial and was $29.99 if I wanted to buy it, as opposed to $59.99 normally; although now I see that Amazon has it for $19.99 after rebates).  Unfortunately, Money ate my data file after about a week (it was just gone, nowhere to be found).  That really ticked me off, since I’d spent a lot of time entering all of my account information and financial data into it.

The ways of technology are mysterious, but one rule that you can count on is that the chance of technology failure increases in direct proportion to the importance or need for that bit of technology.  When I turned my cell phone on at 7:45 this morning it almost immediately buzzed and beeped (causing me to nearly drop it), indicating that I had a voice message.  Since I tend to use the cell mostly for outgoing calls, it usually means that something’s gone wrong if I get a message on it.

A friend of mine had left me a message at 11:30 last night wondering if there was any way to recover a file.  She was working on her last paper (at least until grad school) and her laptop appeared to have lost it.  When I called her, it turned out to be worse than that.  The file was corrupted and portions of the paper were missing.  At that point, the only suggestion I could offer was to try to recover from the .TMP file left behind by Word.

I feel bad for her, because this laptop has been a pain since she got it about two years ago.  It’s a Sony Vaio that came preloaded with Windows ME.  It tends to freeze, it has trouble writing CDs with my Iomega Predator USB burner (the Predator worked fine on my laptop, though), and sometimes it doesn’t want to shut down (one time I had to pull the power cable and remove the battery pack to get it to stop).  I think the thing’s possessed by some kind of malevolent computing demon.

Now that school’s over, she’s asked me to reinstall it in the hopes that it will be more stable.  I’m going to exorcise that demon with a dose of XP and the latest BIOS updates and drivers.

It turns out that the call for tlhIngan (Klingon) interpreters was a joke of sorts.  Of course, the computer industry has been ready to deal with this sort of situation for a couple of years.  The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) has assigned it the language tag i-klingon for use in locale-sensitive code.

Klingon is interesting in that it is an actual language that can be used for real communication.  The writers of Star Trek wanted it to make sense, so they consulted a linguist (Dr Marc Okrand) .  After the publication of The Klingon Dictionary: English-Klingon Klingon-English in 1992, some people got together and created The Klingon Language Institute .

As they say, you haven’t read Hamlet until you’ve read it in the original Klingon. 

A word of caution—the Klingon Language Institute seems to be run off the world’s slowest server, so some of those links above may take a while to open.

From what I can see, though, the most important phrase you can know in tlhIngan is “nuqDaq yuch Dapol”, which translates as “Where do you keep the chocolate?”

I wonder what the tlhIngan phrase for “Trek geek” is…

Qapla’

There’s an old saying that the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.  I would love to have one of these to replace my two-year old Palm Vx, but aside from my living room, I don’t go to many places that have 802.11b access.

Thanks to the asswitted pissant who created W32.HLLW.Nebiwo, all of us are required to run a manual virus scan on our machines here at work.  I usually endure this hellish scan on Mondays from 12:00 to 4:00.  My poor pathetic laptop is grinding itself into a slow death as it scans files (current stats—515500 files scanned, elapsed time 198:45; update: final stats—714350 files scanned, elapsed time 273:33).

I hate virus writers with a passion, because most of them are pathetic little teenaged asswipes who downloaded a virus kit.  To the nitwit who released W32.HLLW.Nebiwo, I hope your already tiny nether parts shrivel up and blow away.