Page 25 of 28
- Dick Cheney shoots friend while hunting
- Downgrading the funniness because Whittington had a heart attack
Trivial Internet Payments
I want to be able to pay for simple services on The Internets, say running a few searches on a subscription site, without having to shell out for their full subscription service. Earlier today I wanted to look up some restaurants in Zagat’s guide which, like everything these days, has interweb-searchability but, because they are a commercial entity, using said service requires having a subscription. This is something where, right now at least, I don’t want to sign up to use it for a month as I only want to run a couple of searches and paying $20 to use it for a day is a waste. There should be some system by which I can pay per search or buy a short time period to access the site, worth less than a dollar.
Such payments, which are trivial to consumers who would barely think twice about paying for services all over the web once setup with the service, could net business like Zagat’s online arm or Consumer Reports online searching functionality a significant amount of money. There must be other people out there who have wanted to use a service for a short period, but don’t care enough to sign up for a full subscription.
Windows XP on Intel Macs
About a month ago a guy started a site to collect donations and build a pool of money that would be given to the first person to get Windows XP runing on the new Intel-based Macs. In the intervening time, some development progress has been made but overall it’s been quite slow. The hold up is that Windows has forever been designed to run on a machine with a standard BIOS that was designed way back when… Basically, the Intel Macs initiate the boot process in a wholly different manner than all x86 PCs have previously. This different booting strategy has been the real holdup in getting Windows to run on the otherwise fairly standard hardware and it looks like last week someone got past that hurdle, booting into the Windows installer. With that, I’d say we’re nearing the time when Windows will run on Macs, a glorious day indeed.
Spinner
Do you administer or use unix systems remotely? Ones that log you out if you’re idle for long enough? Spinner is a program that runs in the background and periodically sends characters to keep your session from going idle. Cool.
List of songs with titles that do not appear in the lyrics
I was browsing around my favorite interwebsite and I noticed this page . Ok, so maybe not everything on Wikipedia is useful…
Arctic weather
So, I knew it was going to be cold on Thursday when the NPR 5 minute news brief, which sticks to big stories like terrorists taking control of Israel or massive protests by fundamentalists, had a guy from the National Weather Service on saying, “This is going to be the first arctic air burst we’ve had all year; it’s going to be quite cold.”
new-post
I’m not really a fan of Jay Leno, but this quote about the whole Cheney shooting incident was very, very good; kudos to his writers.
“What a nightmare I had last night. I dreamed I was at a Washington party and I had to choose between Dick Cheney taking me on a hunting trip or Ted Kennedy driving me home.” –Jay Leno
This came from a page with a list of jokes made about Cheney since back in the first term. It also links to a couple of great clips from The Daily Show on shooting:
Stopping Brute Force SSH Attacks with fail2ban
I noticed a lot of network and forking activity while using my computer last week, thanks to GKrellM I checked around and noticed a constant series of hits in my auth.log from someone trying common names to login via SSH. I blocked the offender, but from looking through the log, this happened quite often and, though I have very strong passwords, this was very annoying to me to see all that crap in the logs. I searched around and found a daemon called fail2ban that simply watches the logs and blocks hosts who have more than a specified number of failed login attempts. It’s in the Debian repositories, so just apt-get install fail2ban and then configure it in /etc/fail2ban.conf.
I also saw some cool tips on the CLUG Wiki.
My desk
This probably isn’t that interesting, but I’ll may find it good to look back on at some point. A simple picture of my desk while I’m working on a project on the laptop and the right screen (I just got the LCD for Christmas); you can also see the massive queue of books I needed to get through at that time. That little plastic shelf almost broke.
Sonic Commercials
Sonic, the fast food chain self-proclaimed “America’s Drive-in,” which, I guess is true; it’s the only drive in I know of this side of Oklahoma. I’m not much for fast food, but I quite enjoy Sonic, probably only because of the novelty, as I only get it on my way to the Outer Banks, NC. What confuses me is their advertising scheme. The only place I’ve ever seen Sonic locations is in southern Virginia and beyond; indeed, the farthest north location on their website is in Williamsburg, Virginia. Yet I see their television advertisments in D.C. And in Rochester, fully 550 miles from Williamsburg. Why do they advertise here, again?
Conversations within the apartment
My roomate and I have conversations in the apartment and rather than showing each other what we’re looking at we usually just send links. This produces interesting chat logs:
Drew: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_16955,00.html
Drew: http://www.usps.com/shipping/expressmail.htm
Drew: http://postcalc.usps.gov/default.asp?Country=Domestic&CountryIndex=1&MT=1&M=0&P=0&O=2&OZ=12000&DZ=14623&origin=default
Drew: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000DC16O/ref=xs_gb_off_dtl_3_sg/102-6924799-8398511?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Drew: http://www.garmin.com/products/forerunner201/
Drew: http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=garmin%20forerunner&btnG=Search+Froogle
Drew: http://m-w.com/dictionary/couple
Drew: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_ordered_November_15%2C_2005
Drew: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
Drew: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_ordered_October_18%2C_2005
Drew: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers/hardware_orders
Drew: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
Drew: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=t&url=en.wikipedia.org#top
Brady: http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm