Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Cnet informs us that a year end report will confirm that the CAN-SPAM act did little to slow the growth of spam. Maybe someone can convince the govt. that spammers won’t pay any more attention to them than they pay to their voters. It’s the money that talks. As long as Joe Dork keeps on buying penis enlargers from Russian spammers, and Gramma Nobody keeps buying Vioxx from Mexican spammers, we’ll have to put up with this disease. Eventually, the spammers (no honor among theives and all that) will rip-off enough people to stop these purchases, and the spammers will move on to the next get-rich-quick scheme.

Leave it to the scum-of-the-internet to ruin something good. Again. I’ve had to switch to moderated comments because of the rash of spam-ments I’ve gotten from online poker twits. Once again… I’ll remind people that there is no honor among theives. Those who would spam a blog with things that they know should not be there will also rip off anyone dumb enough to follow a link in the spam. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not patronize these criminals. You’ll just promote the spread of these digital diseases.

I’ve added a Security category to the weblog. If you hear of any vulnerabilities in any of the major OS’es or application packages, please post it here. You might alo want to check this category every now and then to see what the recent vulnerabilities have been reported.

I moved some earlier posts from the Tech News and General categories into Security because they fit the new category better.

C-Net is reporting that a new Windows exploit can compromise a machine by displaying a specially written image file. Since this is a flaw in one of the libraries that Windows uses to load images, so it is likely to appear in all browsers, email packages, and anything else that displays an image. It is unlikely that switchimg browsers or email software will help at all. You can help reduce your vulnerability by setting your emailer to NOT display images in email. Other than that, you would probably need to change OS’es to avoid this one. Hope for a timely patch, good luck, and Merry Christmas are about the only other bits of advice I can give.

I would like to wish all of you and yours a Very Merry Christmas. I would love to give each and every one of you a wonderful holiday gift, but I couldn’t get my matter-to-digital converter working in time. Oh well, there is always next year .

I plan to make some big anouncements early in the new year, so pop in now and then for an update.

AnandTech has a look at running Linux on Intel’s Dothan processor. Some of the results are surprising. This Pentium-M variant looks to have a bright future in the blade server market. It’s expensive, but it runs cool. It ahieves competitive performance with much lower power requirements and therefore, much lower cooling requirements. It is a good choice for a server, but it seems a poor choice for gamers (for now).

Linux lasts longer, at least according to this CNet article. Unpatched systems on the internet last for two months in the case of Linux, 4 minutes in the case of Windows. I know which one I’d be able to patch before getting compromised.

All FUD aside, Linux is much better for an “always-on” connection, but it still isn’t good enough. My advice: put both systems behind a firewalled router and close all ports except the ones you absolutely need. In the case of your average home user, there will be no servers inside of the firewall, so all ports can remain closed up tight. If you decide to run a server, just forward that port to the server machine. In my house, I run an email server, a web server and DNS. I have only the necessary ports open, and they connect to a Linux machine running all of the servers.

Firewalled routers are cheap these days, I got a 4 port router with 802.11 b/g wireless support for about $70, and that was 6 months ago. The firewall is worth every penny, although the wireless was my real reason for the purchase.

Once you get the firewall set up, install Firefox on all systems. Mozilla would also be OK, and it is a fine browser, but it is a bit too unweildy for grandma, or evn a teenage girl to handle. Whether you believe MSIE gets hacked because it is more buggy or because it is more popular is irrelevant… Switch to Firefox anyway. Then set Firefox to block all popups. That will end all of your problems with spyware right then and there.

Email is a different problem. Outlook, Thunderbird, whatever email program you use, will still have lots of problems catching any virus that comes in. Email vulnerabilities can be manageable if you follow a few simple rules. Never turn on previews. Never open anything that you aren’t sure of. If you cant trust yourself (and you probably can’t), buy something to scan your email. Norton, McAfee, whatever.

I’m going on 5 years of having an “always on” connection, and I haven’t lost any data or gained any viruses yet, despite having 2 teenage daughters online a majority of the time, and my network server online 24/7. Spyware and spam are a different story… I’ve gotten my share of those

– end of fatherly advice

I’ve upgraded PHP to a version that does not contain the Santy worm vulnerability. I don’t believe that any of the data on the site was ever vulnerable at all, but I decided to err on the side of paranoia. My apologies if you tried to access the site this afternoon and got an apology page.

AnandTech has gotten an OTS 1GB DIMM with standard air cooling to run at DDR2-821. If you are thinking about upgrading your Intel system to a 925XE, you want to check this one out.

AintItCool has news and reviews of the upcoming Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie. I have the books (including the omnibus copy) and the TV series on DVD, so I guess I qualify as a fan. I’ll post any movie stuff that I stmble across. Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.

The guys over at Toms Hardware are running a live stress test of AMD and Intel systems. Looks like the biggest problem they have had is with the power supply. I guess we know which one of those NOT to buy . I’m not quite clear on whether the 2 reboots shown for the Intel system correspond to the 2 power supply problems or not. Doesn’t matter whether you are and Intel or AMD fan. Check out the live geek show!

BluesNews has the best list of places to find the HL2 demo. Hope you have a good broadband connection all to yourself. It’s a 751 MB download. Larger than a CD full.

C Net has posted an interesting retrospective of the top 2 x86 CPU makers. Definitely worth taking this trip down memory lane.

PC Mag has published their list of Geek gifts to avoid. I just wish they would send a list to my wife. Well, hope she didn’t get any of these!

Most gamers suspected it, but this the first time I’ve seen it in print. The $125 million premier day for Halo2 beat the Hollywood record weekend of $114 million for Spiderman. Have they gotten the hint yet? Nah! There are still dozens of entertainment shows that considers “who-wears-what-on-the-red-carpet” to be the most important thing in the world. Gamers only have one rule for wardrobe: The weapons you wear can be a matter of life or deathmatch.

OK… So it’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s a step forward. After previewing dozens of site search tools and playing with ways to get Google to do my searches for me, I finally decided to cut to the chase and write my own search utility. The 4 hours I spend figuring out how to do it myself was much more useful than the days I spent trying to fit someone else’s app into my page. I ended up with something that is extremely small and brain-dead meaning it was exactly what I wanted.

Check it out if you get the chance: http://www.shamelessgeeks.com/employment/searchresume.shtml.

BTW… I’ve been getting a few search string hits on my resume lately. It looks like an online resume is a worthwhile thing if you are in the market for a job. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

According to CNN, Microsoft is not ruling out a fee for anti-spyware software that fixes vulnerabilities that they planted on your machine and forced you to use. Does anyone else find this disgusting? Shouldn’t they be paying us for the time it takes to fix their poorly written software?

Another major IE bug has been identified. This one allows any web page to be spoofed, and there is currently no workaround. I suggest you look this one over before using IE again. Better yet: get Firefox and avoid the problem altogether.

AnandTech has a nice article on ATI and NVIDIA support for Linux. It looks like ATI still has a long way to go before they have a competitive setup. One thing that the article doesn’t mention is that ATI still doesn’t support XFree 4.4. That means that you have to go with one of the older distros to get any support at all. Note that the version of Suse that they use isn’t exactly the latest release.

The new patches for Call of Duty and United Offensive are out. I heard about a patch for a Linux version as well, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Well, we all could have predicted it, though most of us didn’t. Two GPU’s on one card. Tom’s Hardware has this preview of Gigabyte’s dual-GPU graphics card. According to the article, the dual card is supposed to beat nVidia and ATI’s best single GPU cards, but at a lower price. It accomplishes this by using 2 mid-priced GPU’s for the job. One question they didn’t answer: How much power? Oh well, I guess a state-of the-art graphics card that gets really hot is a geek’s dream anyway. After all, it can render your FPS at an incredible speed and resolution, while cooking your Hot Pocket at the same time! Geek Heaven!

Be careful about opening those Christmas e-cards. eWEEK is reporting that the new Zafi-D worm is using a yuletide social engineering trick to spread itself in several different languages. I guess nothing is sacred to worms or to the worms who write them.

Get The Facts is something that everyone in the computer industry has been hearing for quite a while now. Get The Truth seems to be something that we really need. An Australian IT company has fired another shot in the TCO wars. This one claims to be more open than others.

My personal experience:

• The purchase price of Linux is free, but it is tougher to manage because it is so much more secure and versatile, plus the number of experts in the field is smaller
• Management costs for Linux have been steadily falling as people become familiar with it.
• Linux will have a tough time as long as existing hardware and application companies are held hostage by existing M$ agreements.
• Most new companies are avoiding these silly agreements, so that should change over time.
• M$ is still the only gaming OS around. That will probably persist for quite a while.

If you use each OS for what it is designed for (Linux for work, M$ for home… subject to change) you’ll never go wrong. And thats The Truth.

ATI has released version Beta3 of the 64-bit Catalyst driver. That’s nice, and I appreciate the effort, but I would like to see a driver that works with a recent Linux distro. Love the hardware, hate the attitude toward open source. It would be a shame if this had to influence my next graphics card purchasing decision (hint, hint).

There is a new batch of windows patches out for December. In my case, the auto updater installed them with only a generic description that said something like “a security vulnerability has been identified… blah blah blah". If you wanted to know a little more about what you downloaded, check out this list provided by Neowin.

Steam is updating clients for some general fixes and an HL2 optimization. The updates will be applied automatically when you log in next.

Just ran across a Slashdot pointer to an article about the gEDA project. I ran across this tool many years ago, before it was mature enough to be of any use. I intend to get re-acquainted with it. For those of you who don’t know, gEDA is a suite of hardware design tools that are fully GPL’ed. Even if they turn out to be limited, they will probably be useful enough for a hobbyist. I’ll post a review in a few weeks.

Looks like Doom fans are unhappy with the guy who wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Doom movie, according to this article on HomeLAN Fed. The final product is scheduled for release in August, so I guess we’ll find out how bad it really is then. Knowing the track record of how the movie industry follows scripts not written by HollyWeird pap generators, I wouldn’t expect much. It will probably end up having something to do with posessed Republicans from outer space conspiring to steal innocent Promoters’ cocaine stashes. That’s what Hollywood people would consider the ultimate horror.

Yes, according to a CNet news article. The only problem is that they never really tested Windows. Now I’m a card-carrying Linux fan, and I believe that Linux probably has fewer bugs than Windows, but I’d rather wait until someone comes up with something more than a SWAG before I point to it as evidence. Try again boys! You’ll get there eventually.

The part of the article that states that Linux has far fewer bugs than average is certainly something to be proud of. Although the statement that average code has 1-7 bugs per 1000 lines of code is pretty disturbing. If my code had that many bugs, I’d be fired on the spot. Maybe I should send this article to my boss

Well, I think we all suspected it, but it’s official… We have now seen a judge listed on e-bay. And you thought it was only politicians that were 4 sale

Over 10 Million intelligent consumers have made the switch to Firefox. It’s easy to see where our loyalties lie here… It’s written all over our pipe! If you haven’t made the switch yet, I would urge you to click on the link above, or just go to www.mozilla.org. I use Firefox at home and at work, on both Linux and Windows. Since I switched, Spybot and Ad-aware have detected far less spyware on Windows. In fact, the only time I ever found any critical objects was when my Wife visited e-bay with MSIE. Since I converted her, I haven’t had any critical objects at all! Believe me… It’s well worth the effort.

Matsushita Electric of Japan is about to release a new type of battery that lasts 1.5 times as long as a regular alkaline. Rabbit stew anyone?

13 pocky sticks a meltin’~ >_>

(Ahem) Anyway, anybody trying to figure out how to give your geek that special something? Or are you that special geek trying to get out of recieving yet another lawnchair this year? Just crawl your way over to this really REALLY subtle hint over here and have a merry christmas.

As for me, I’m going to grab myself a pint o’ eggnog and avoid doing any writing for the holiday season. >_> You heard me, Shameless! No writing! Hah!

……..admittedly not the smartest thing to say when I’m within throwing distance, but since when has anyone in this family had anything remotely close to common sense?

I think not. But that’s what Yahoo Media Helper told me when I inadvertently clicked on a Windows Media limk while running Linux. Looks like Yahoo’s web team really is a bunch of Yahoos.

According to TheRegister.com, Intel has demo’ed its dual-core 65 nm Yonah CPU. It isn’t expected to ship until sometime in 2006, but at least it isn’t ‘vaporware’ anymore. I guess you could call it ‘notyetreadyware’.

An online “school” that gave an MBA to a cat is being sued for various crimes, as reported by USA Today. What’s wrong with a cat trying to pass as an MBA? I’m sure there are lots of MBA’s trying to pass as CAT’s

eWeek is reporting a browser exploit that affects all (or at least most) of the browsers that run on Windows and Mac OS X. No word on Linux in the article, but the fact that they mention Konqueror isn’t very promising. Shall I say it? Get Firefox, Disable Pop-Ups, Done!

News.com reports that Intel is now talking about releasing 64-bit P4’s some time in 2005. This coincides with the M$ announcement of 64-bit Windows in the same time period. I’m glad to see the 64-bit world push forward, but I’m a little concerned about the timing of everything. The main question is: who was waiting for whom? There have been beta versions of 64-bit Windows available for about a year, and Intel claims to have the circuitry for 64-bits already in the guts of the P4. Can anyone think of a reason why either company would hold back that doesn’t involve illegal business practices? M$ could easily have thrown 64-bit Windows versions that support Opteron and Athlon 64 on the market long ago. With all of the other 64-bit OS’es out there, Intel had no reason to hold back on 64-bit hardware. It all smells fishy to me.

M$ is closing in a 64-bit Windows release according to CNet. The biggest news is that they intend to allow those of us with 32-bit versions to upgrade to 64-bit versions for free! Whoopee! Well, given MicroSlow’s track record, I’ll reserve comment till it actually happens. It might even soften the blow from their decision to let Win2k virus carriers to go unpatched.

On the heels of the spectacularly popular Firefox browser, Mozilla has released their companion email client Thunderbird 1.0. I’ve been using old versions of Thunderbird (0.8 and 0.9) for a while now, and I highly recommend them. I even got it to work with an Athlon 64!

Silly as this sounds, it appears to be a real article over at TheRegister.com. Not sure if this would be a comedy, or a horror story.

Shameless has brought you his first Christmas Carol: The Shameless 12 Days of Christmas. As usual, it indicates a moderately twisted personality with a tendency to slip into delusional euphoria. Don’t know what that means, but it sounds like fun.

Microsoft has scrapped SP5 for win2k as reported by eWeek. Of course, this means that Win2K won’t even get the meager security fixes that XPSP2 provided. Honestly… If a bunch of students and volunteers can out-code your security, shouldn’t you just admit incompetence? …And how about a little quality control for those of us who have to keep fixing the virus infested PC’s you failed to protect? It looks to me like M$ has no room to complain about the fact that more and more geeks are recommending Linux and Mac’s to their friends and employers. Yeah… I DID Get The Facts, and found out that yours are spinning like a top. Try these facts on for size. M$ actually gained some credibility in my eyes when they made an effort (small though it was) to fix security issues with XPSP2. They just lost all credibility when they made this decision.

Tom’s Hardware is reporting that LCD panel prices dropped by about 1/5 in Q3, and are expected to drop by another 1/5 during Q4. Hello? does this mean that me and the other financially challenged geeks of the world can finally afford to get rid of the flickering VGA monitor soon?

Hormel is getting into the spirit of the upcoming play “Monty Python’s Spamalot” by giving away a free can of Spam Golden Honey Grail to the first 100 people who buy tickets tomorrow. They also plan to make the product available to a limited number of retailers in February. You gotta admire a company that can laugh at itself along with the rest of us. I can wait for my next plate of Spam Spam Spam sausage Spam eggs Spam Spam and Spam. Now if they could just keep their product out of my inbox…

Depending on how geeky you are, you will either find this Half Life history a really cool find, or way over the top. Come to think of it, if you think this is over the top, why are you here? One warning: you may want to avoid this if you don’t want to spoil the surprise. In my case, I’ll probably never get to finish it anyway.

President George W. Bush just signed an extension to the Internet Tax Ban that lasts through 2007. Time to whip out the credit card and celebrate! Note that when our President does something I like, I always use his full name and title

If you’ve been under a rock this past week, here’s some news for you: Lycos has been waging a nasty DDoS campaign against spammers in Europe. The spammers fired back, taking out Lycos. I hate spammers just as much as the next geek, but doesn’t this look a bit like playpen tactics? It’s not even mature enough for the schoolyard. Instead of slash and burn, which can easily take out a lot of the innocent as well as the guilty, why not just expose them to the light of day, where they will eventually just dry up? Im also very surprised that a large company like this would get involved in something so dopey. If I gave out a Shameless Twit award, Lycos would have it locked up this year.

I managed to validate all of the pages to either XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.1 Strict. This includes all site pages as well as all current submissions and resumes. I really mean all, too. I even validated the authorization failure page (though I didn’t put the W3C icon on it). If your browser has trouble showing any of the pages… well, don’t blame me, blame the World Wide Web Consortium.

In the near future, I’ll move the W3C icons to someplace a little more appropriate than the prime real estate in the upper left corner of the page. Until them, I have no problem showing off the fact that I took the time to validate all of my pages

AnandTech has a nice, longwinded article about AMD vs. Intel on dual CPU database servers. Once again, AMD wins on overall performance and bang-for-buck. Even if you aren’t interested in database servers, you might want to check out some of the analysis in this article. It makes a good attempt to explain why some features help performance, and why others just cost money.

Someone in PA stole a Krispy Kreme truck, and Swatara Township’s Finest recovered it. Not really much of a story here. I just couldn’t resist a headline like Police Recover Donuts. Nothing like a good stereotype to get you going for the day.

Steam has few HL2 updates ready for your next signon. Update includes stuff for the Source SDK, the Source Engine, and DM.

Please excuse the silence for the past day or so. It came to my attention that most of the pages on this site were full of spec. violations that can cause indigestion for web crawlers. When I ran the front page against a validator, I was astonished at how many violations and outright errors there were. In the interest of providing a quality web site, I’ve begun a campaign of cleaning up all of the pages to XHTML 1.0 Transitional at a minimum. You’ll be able to tell which pages have passed and which spec. they comply to by the W3C icon: somewhere in the upper left corner of the page. If you click on the icon, it will re-validate the page and display the results for you.

If anyone finds a page that has the W3C icon displayed, but doesn’t pass validation, PLEASE let me know. Wish me luck in this tedious and frustrating endeavor.

Must be a slow news day again. Just about everyone on the web has a post about the new ATI X850 release. It looks like a wonderful card that is a slight step up from the X800. Unfortunately, it’s not any closer to my price range. You can find reviews at The Register.com, FiringSquad.com and AnandTech.com. AnandTech also has a list of reviews from around the web. Enjoy.

Last night the rrumors about a Half-life deathmatch were confirmed when Steam released a deathmatch mod with the SDK. How about TF2? Any geeks out there wanna take a whack at it? I guess that’s too much to ask.

It looks like the amount of time an unpatched windows system will last on the internet is down to 4 minutes.

Can you install the patches in 4 mintues? I’d like to see ya try!