I just put up some nice photos of Chicago at night that I took this evening. The sun was reflecting off the buildings in quite a nice way.

Enjoy!

via Forever Geek, a couple pretty useful google map mods: Cheap Gas and Pseudo-Traceroute.

What’s next…a Google map of your hard drive?

I used to have Google Desktop installed on my laptop and I loved being able to find things that my brain forgot where I had left them. I also installed Yahoo! Desktop search on my home machine, but I wasn’t that impressed with it and ended up uninstalling it.

Well after about 2 hours of searching for an old document last night, I decided to give Copernic Desktop Search a shot. After it was done indexing, it found the document I was looking for within seconds in an old sent email.

So amazingly useful.

So I finally pulled the trigger and picked up the Dell 2005FPW. That’s right, the UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor and man is this sucker pretty. I’ve had the 1702FP for several years and have loved it and I’m sure the 2005FPW will treat me just as well. I almost want to get a second one…

In any case, it’s functionality on my primary system was going to be something of a question mark as I run Windows Server 2003 for my desktop (I don’t do much gaming…) and I have an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Well ATI doesn’t officially release or support their cards on Server operating systems, but their XP versions generally install OK.

I snagged the latest ATI Catalyst drivers and installed them, but when I rebooted I got an error message about the ATI Control Panel:

The ATI Control Panel failed to initialize because no ATI driver is installed, or ATI driver is not working properly.

A quick Google led me to this forum post with very detailed instructions on how to install Catalyst drivers on Server 2003. However, there were only two things that I needed to do from those instructions to make the control panel work:

<li>Add the two *_XP.REG files in C:\ATI\SUPPORT\5-5_xp-2k_dd_cp_wdm\CPanel to the registry.</li>
<li>Enable full hardware acceleration in the Advanced Troubleshooting properties.</li>

Once I did that and rebooted, the ATI Control Panel came up with no problem at all and I could rotate my brand new 2005FPW at my leisure!

I wonder how a 2005FPW looks on a mac…

I had some weird pregnancy dreams last night.

The first was one where I met up with a girl at work that I had a crush on when I was in grade school (Cornelia). I totally mistook her for someone else I actually dated in high school, too. Oops. In any case, we talked for a bit and turns out that she was pregnant. Nothing more to that part than that, though. I just remember wandering around the office, which wasn’t really my office, for some reason.

The second one was a little more disturbing. I was getting on the ‘L’ in Chicago and ran into this girl I had a crush on in middle school (Erin). Turns out she was pregnant too, but with a baby she didn’t want. Then she faux-fainted so I would catch her. Silly girl… But then she walked over to the stairs and pretended to faint again and said “Damon, don’t let me fall”. I couldn’t catch her and she went sliding down the stairs and it was obvious to me what she was trying to do because she didn’t yell or anything…just fell back all peaceful-like looking me in the face. I don’t remember much more than running down the stairs and picking her up, though.

Then after that I was in a bedroom that I really liked. I’ve been hunting for furniture lately and I liked how everything was layed out in this room except for the fact that there were two full beds instead of one bed… :-\ But there were nice bedside tables and a nice bench by the window which oddly enough overlooked the garage. And it was just starting to snow outside. It was so cozy.

I knew I lived in a great city.

Buns and Dogs to both be sold in packages of 8!

Mom, don’t look at this!

The Chicago crime database just went live today and guess what…it integrates with Google Maps! This was something I actually wanted to do after I saw the craigslist hack - put together a google map of crime in the city. I am very impressed with the person that put the site together - they did an excellent job!

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a really slick online password generator. The reason I liked it so much was because it allowed you to generate passwords that could be typed be either the left hand, right hand, or both.

I neglected to bookmark or tag the page in any way, however, so if anybody knows about it or something similar please leave a comment.

:(

Update - I think I found it!

Check it out - SecurePassword Generator! Every few weeks since I posted this, I’ve opened up a different search engine and typed variations of ‘password generator left right keyboard hand side’, etc. I finally found it today by searching for password generator right qwerty on MSN - result #3! And it was released on May 5, which would put it exactly in the right time-frame. I feel a great sense of satisfaction…and a desire to make it better. I was going to work on my web server tonight…but perhaps I’ve got another project now.

And people wonder why I don’t like traveling to Cleveland…

It never fails. The Southwest gates tucked at the end of the terminal, crammed with people, and nearly every flight delayed with all prior flights full to the point of not even having a chance with standby. This is where I spent 6 1/2 hours of my day yesterday.

I showed up early in hopes of getting standby which didn’t happen. Fine, not a problem. I can occupy myself for a couple hours. Then my 5:15 flight gets delayed until 5:50. The next thing I hear about the flight is around 6:20, telling us it will be in at about 6:30 with a 6:50 departure. 7:00 rolls around and I’m just getting on the plane. Nice two-hour delay, there.

Now normally, a flight from Cleveland to Chicago takes about 45-50 minutes. This one took 2 hours due to inclement weather right in-between Cleveland and Chicago which meant we had to fly thorough Michigan and circle for an extra 30-45 minutes. The worst part of it was… I had pounded down the peanuts they give you in anticipation of being able to coat my mouth with a delicious beverage. Due to the fact that they didn’t start serving until well into the flight, they weren’t able to serve everybody.

Tired, haggard, and dying for a drink, at least I was able to climb into a black stretch limo and enjoy the ride home until I could properly pass out on my couch with all my clothes on and my contacts in.

In a new paper being presented right now, it has been determined that hyper-threading can permit local information disclosure.

As virtualization grows, I’m sure we will see more of these types of vulnerabilities.

source [daemonology.net]